Video Essay – Page 17 – Press Play Video Blog

WATCH: A Montage of the Sensuous Close-Ups in Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Boogie Nights’

The first time I saw Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, and the second, the sexuality which gives the film its essential underpinning didn’t make much of an impression on me. I was aware that vaguely lewd things were going on onscreen, and I suppose I should have been more interested in–if that’s the right way to phrase it–Roller Girl’s proud nudity, in Amber Waves’s sad sexuality, in Dirk’s Diggler, but really, I wasn’t. In all honesty, the appearance of the film was more interesting to me–its flash, its swagger, its Scorsese-esque movement–than its insight into the porn world, or its sexual excesses. That may have been the point, but it’s a little hard to say, in Anderson’s case, because so often his films revel in the depths to which they penetrate, and sexual over-indulgence is certainly one color in his palette, as Press Play has indicated previously. Nevertheless, given that, the close-up shot is an effective tool for Anderson–perhaps just as effective as the long shot. What’s interesting is what Anderson does with the technique: rather than using it for suspense, or to drive narrative, he’s trying to force us to look at something, really look at it, and perhaps get lost in its strangeness for a while. The object could be a camera lens, a cup of coffee being poured, a zipper: regardless, Anderson drives us inward. And we find, as this excellent, if spontaneously executed, montage by Justin Barham shows, that the journey can be very exciting indeed.

Watch: A Video Essay on Satan in Film History

…horror and doubt distract
His troubl’d thoughts, and from the bottom stir

The Hell within him, for within him Hell

He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell

One step no more then from himself can fly

By change of place…

—John Milton, Paradise
Lost, Book IV

The character of Satan seems far more appealing to
filmmakers than the character of God. This may be for reasons of propriety: one
should not, perhaps, make too many images of God. But since when has Hollywood
cared about anything other than money and stardom? God isn’t any good for
either. Omnipotence is just too boring.

There are devils in most films, because most films are
melodramas of one sort of another, and no melodrama works very well without
some embodiment of evil. But Satan himself (or herself or theirself or anyself
— Satan, like every angel, fallen or not, is any gender and every gender) is a
less common figure. One of the most powerful Satanic representations in film
history wasn’t even technically of Satan: it was Mephistopheles in Murnau’s Faust, still one of the most visually
interesting portrayals of satanic power.

The problem with portraying Satan is that it is difficult to
capture the full horror he is supposed to be capable of. Less is more: the
films that go for gothic bombast tend to end up causing laughter more than
horror. Satans with horns and tails are downright goofy, and rarely appear in
anything except broad (and usually unfunny) comedies.

But the Satans that seem most human — the Satans that
reflect the satanic desires we ourselves carry within us — those Satans can dig deep into our
nightmares. I’ve never forgotten Robert DeNiro in Angel Heart since I first saw the movie as a teenager. DeNiro was a
truly frightening Satan not just because he’s a great actor, but also because
he’s a great actor who’s played Satanic humans such as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. These days, it seems to me,
the most Satanic character on our screens is Mads Mikkelsen’s Hannibal, who
vividly, frighteningly captures the charisma that still exudes from the pages
of Milton’s Paradise Lost, about
which scholars still argue whether Milton was, as William Blake insisted, “of
the Devil’s party.”

Given the horror available around the world every day,
perhaps we hold no real fear of Hell, and so no real fear of Satan. What could
Satan do that humans don’t already do to each other all the time? Filmmakers
seem to have realized this, and thus the relative rarity of seriously scary
Satans. We are more horrifying than any of our myths or fantasies. Anything
ascribed to Satan is something a person has already imagined.

The devil is a human dream, a dream of the human, and that’s
what makes him frightening.

WATCH: A Video Essay Based on a New Book about Wes Anderson’s ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’

If there were an Endowed Chair in Wes Anderson studies, Matt Zoller Seitz would probably occupy it. The man has immersed himself as thoroughly as one might conceivably immerse one’s self in the director’s work for untold years, and two great books have come out of it: The Wes Anderson Collection, a remarkable survey of Anderson’s work, and now a supplementary volume devoted solely to The Grand Budapest Hotel. This video essay for RogerEbert.com, which is based on the new book, is in and of itself a master class, of sorts, thanks to the collaboration of Seitz and expert video editor Steven Santos. If you ever wanted to know how to time a voice track over film clips in a video essay, watch this piece. If you ever wanted to know how to avoid saying too much in a video essay, watch this piece; Seitz says quite a bit with a remarkably economical script. And, if you ever wanted to know how to teach others how to appreciate a director’s work, watch this piece: Seitz’s enthusiasm for Anderson’s films, particularly this one, fed by admirable scholarship, is infectious.

Watch: A Video Essay on Guillermo del Toro’s Colors

In the work of Guillermo del Toro, color is as important as fantasy; the director has the color sense of a Van Gogh or Rembrandt, merged with an imagination worthy of H.P. Lovecraft, Italo Calvino, and Luis Bunuel all rolled into one. This video essay by Kian Lanares is a luxuriant walk through some of Del Toro’s lush creations, moving from early films like Cronos or The Devil’s Backbone through such later films as Pan’s Labyrinth, or the Hellboy series. The stories told in these films are, at times, somewhat light, but the coloration is so intense and so nourishing that it tells a story which might contradict the plot on screen, much as if a composer took the basic notes of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and cast them with ominous, deep chords. In any event, this piece is a well-composed delight, both intellectually and visually.

WATCH: A Video Essay about Faith and IDA

**ALERT: This video essay contains spoilers.**

The title of this piece, "Framing the Faith of IDA," is appropriate: when watching Pawel Pawlikowski’s film, the element that stands out most is, indeed, the visual framework. Walls. Roofs. Squares. Diagonals. Triangles. Rectangles. These shapes merge and conspire to press downwards against the film’s heroine, as she, in turn, frees herself (if only momentarily) from the constraints of faith, or at least finds out what life is like on the other side of it. Steve Vredenburgh’s video essay for the Brehm Center neatly takes apart structural elements of the film, such as the differences in characters’ clothing, or the film’s drab colors, and examines the ways in which they support this dramatic, strange, unforgettable film’s exploration of the hazards and benefits of faith.

WATCH: A Beautiful Video Essay on Ingmar Bergman’s Use of Mirrors

Ingmar Bergman was my first love in film, and I suspect he will be my last. I was introduced to him, by way of Wild Strawberries, when I was 12, and although the subject matter of the film–growing old amid regrets–was lost on me, I nevertheless was astounded, even at a young age, by how complex and intellectually entertaining he had made the story. How many human mistakes, and quirks, and moments of discovery there were in this film! The rest of his work would continue to amaze me; the story lines he managed to address–a knight playing chess with death in The Seventh Seal, the misadventures of a traveling performance troupe in The Magician, the tortures of a young couple plagued by exterior and interior demons at odd hours in the middle of nowhere in The Hour of the Wolf–always represented the outer limits of what a filmmaker might accomplish. What better agent for Bergman’s dour narrative than the mirror, here lovingly explored by ::kogonada in this latest video essay, done for the Criterion Collection? When you look in the mirror, after all, there will most likely be no one else watching, and yet it also represents an arena in which you might take down your guard without being entirely alone. The essayist intelligently chooses the poetry of Sylvia Plath, balladeer of the inward-looking life, for a voiceover track for the piece–and beneath the audio, the haunted, sharp tones of a harpsichord composition by Vivaldi keep us marching through Bergman’s films, searching for meaning, certainly, but also trying to determine what it is that the characters see in the mirrors they gaze into. Is it some flaw they are trying to detect? Or are they, like their viewers, trying to determine, as goes the age-old question, what comes next?

WATCH: The Shower Scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’: A Shot by Shot Analysis

Try as you might, you’ll never entirely understand the shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. And by understand, I mean grasp its technique: understand why Hitchcock made the choices he made, why he arranged images in the sequence he chose, why this scene seems, time after time, such a concentration of cinematic energy. You can poke and prod the scene, even map it out meticulously, as Lorenzo Gerbi has done in this excellent video essay–graphing it, monitoring the shifts in focus and the shifts in attenuation as the scene moves forward. And you will gain a certain kind of "understanding" from that activity. But you’ll never fully feel as if you’ve pinned it down, and, if the truth were told, the chances are good that Hitchcock himself would not be able to explain all the choices he made. As dangerous as it may be to make generalizations about creative works, it’s safe to say art doesn’t operate like that. The scene is a masterpiece of planning and deliberation, and as a result it is one of the most watched and talked-about scenes in the history of film. But it also maintains that status because lightning struck, and Hitchcock happened to be in the right place to absorb it, and he transformed his momentary electrocution into the transcendent sequence you can watch here.

Watch: A Video Essay About Sofia Coppola’s Dreamlike Aesthetic

What defines the Sofia Coppola aesthetic? Is it the sublime use of soft
and natural lighting? Is it the subtle pastels of the color pallet?
Maybe the handheld camera that dizzily floats around the characters?
All of these visual characteristics work together harmoniously to create
Coppola’s distinct dreamlike atmosphere. However, the aesthetic
reaches far beyond the idea of a visual trademark–Coppola’s atmosphere
seems to mirror the inner workings of her characters. As Charlotte
ponders a fully-realized life in Lost in Translation, the camera
stutters around her in a circular motion. She is washed away, her
clothing blending into the matching surroundings. In The Bling Ring,
the silhouetted bandits streak across the glittery horizon as they chase
their gaudy and tainted desires. In Marie Antoinette, the fanciful
nature shots portray a longing for freedom and self-fulfillment.
Coppola crafts these dreamscapes to show us not only who her characters
are, but who they want to be.

WATCH: How Nicolas Winding Refn’s ‘Bronson’ Turns the Prison Movie Genre on Its Head

Although the primary charge in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson derives from the electric performance of Tom Hardy, as one of Britain’s most violent criminals, the film builds on a number of sources. As this elegantly stated video essay by Jessie McGoff points out, directors from Jim Sheridan to Stanley Kubrick can be found inside this complex, alarming, surreal work. Refn, in this essayist’s estimation, rewrites the work of these ancestors, not so much exploiting them as putting a new face on them. And, in so doing, Refn updates our conception of the "prison film," a genre which one would think had run out of potential.

Watch: The Expansiveness of Alejandro González Iñárritu: A Video Homage

https://vimeo.com/118931513

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s glance is always outwards. If a woman should be shot in the head while on a bus in a desolate mountain pass, as in Babel, the question is less Will she live? than What will the ramification of the event be for her loved ones in the present and future? If a washed-up actor of dubious talent is revealed to have special powers of telepathy and even flight, as in Birdman, the question is less How does he do that? than What does this mean for him, for his grasps at redemption? Do these powers make a difference? This expansiveness operates at a plot level, but it also operates cinematically. With its swoops, its close-ups, its lens flares, Iñárritu’s cinematography helps us to understand on a visceral level ideas which we might not immediately understand on an intellectual level. This video homage by Steven Thomas brings us into Iñárritu’s perceptive approach with intimacy and grace; this is a memorable tribute to a director who has carves out a place in film history with alarming speed.