Video Essay – Page 23 – Press Play Video Blog

VIDEO ESSAY: R.I.P. Lauren Bacall

What defines sex appeal on the big screen? This is a question that has been pondered in countless essays, sometimes with extensive scholarship attached, sometimes not, but the answer remains elusive, as it should. When watching Lauren Bacall in her early films, it is impossible not to think of "sexy" as one of the adjectives to describe her, and yet where is that sexiness coming from? In part, it comes from a sort of conversational fear, a sense that she, or rather one of the characters she plays, might say something barbed, or worse, at any turn, and that if she doesn’t, she’s choosing not to. There’s a "nothing ventured, nothing gained" quality in the act of watching her; unless there’s some risk involved in any experience–in this case, the risk of shock–there’s no point in having the experience, or so the platitude goes. There’s her voice, of course, the deep-toned, husky, "bedroom" voice, which is, in its own way, permissive; it sends a mood of acceptance, as well as engagement. I first saw Bacall in The Big Sleep when I was quite young, almost too young to understand her, or the importance of the film, or Bogart’s presence in it–but I did understand that she represented a comfort with, and an embodiment of, specifically adult sexuality, for grown-ups, a quality I still consider somewhat removed or Parnassian, even at my current, seemingly mature age. She seemed then, and she seems in retrospect, like a pinnacle, evidence of a time when on-screen sex appeal might emanate from other sources than it does currently.

For now, what we consider sexy has a not-so-subtle price tag attached to it. Many viewers only consider the star or starlet a sex symbol if their image has appeared a certain number of times, on a certain number of billboards, in a certain number of high-profile films. The quality of that appearance is a factor, as well. Viewers know how much money is invested in the films in which the Symbol appears. They know how much money the Symbol is paid for each film. They know who the highest paid stars are. They know what the most expensive films are. Or they can easily find out. They know that technology can easily modify a star’s appearance to make it look however a filmmaker might want it to look. We know that this equipment is highly costly. They know that the said Symbol eats expensive food, gets exercise through an expensive trainer, and wears more expensive clothes than are imaginable to us–or if they’re imaginable, they aren’t within financial reach. All of this ultimately enters, oddly enough, into popular conceptions of sex appeal–and because of the integration of star culture into the larger body of cultural or even news reporting, one might begin to take a matter-of-fact attitude towards this appeal itself. Is the set of reactions, subtle and not-so-subtle, physical and otherwise, to sexiness, lessened with this development? Somewhat. It’s not so much that the stars of yesterday were better, or sexier, it’s that they may have been playing by a slightly different set of rules.

Which brings me to Bacall’s face. When she was introduced to me as a classic sex symbol as a child, my very first thought was Her? Really? She looks so . . . normal. And then I caught on. There is an approachability in her features that doesn’t bear much similarity with the Pitts, the Jolies, the Greens, the Stones, or even the Geres, the Fondas, or the Dickinsons. As theatrical as her movements, her carriage, and her phrasings might be, there’s a sense of the human being beneath it, there, as well; as she herself said, "the look" began because she was lowering her head to keep from shaking too much. In the right light, watching Lauren Bacall could be a powerful reminder of the difference between being an actor and being a human being, and how the best actors show viewers both experiences. Sex appeal at present is more likely to be measured in near-mathematical terms: are the proportions correct? How perfect are the features? If we compare the Symbol to other Symbols, how does this Symbol match up? The simplest way of saying it is that viewers have gotten colder, and the simplest question about a star—sexy? or not sexy?—is filtered through a set of criteria that have little to do with lust and more with what makes a good screensaver. It would be difficult to trace the series of cultural seismic shifts that have led to this attitude, but one thing remains certain. To say Bacall represents another era in moviemaking is unquestionable, and to say that era is bygone is an understatement.–Max Winter

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.

Max Winter is the Editor of Press Play.

VIDEO ESSAY: Our Scary Summer: 1979

[Jed Mayer’s script for the video essay follows.]

The cover of the June 1979 issue
of Newsweek featured an image of
Sigourney Weaver from Alien. The
caption read: "Hollywood’s Scary Summer." I was thirteen. The horror movies
released that summer would form a grotesque
carnival that mirrored my own and the world’s anxieties. Earlier in the
spring there was the disastrous nuclear accident at Three Mile Island. That summer, major oil spills polluted the Gulf of Mexico
and the North Atlantic Ocean. This year, oil prices doubled, Margaret Thatcher
was elected, and the Ayatollah Khomeini rose to power. I slowly came
into awareness of the political and environmental degradation around me that
year. The films I watched reflected that, as well as my own thirteen-year-old desires
and fears .

As tag-lines go, George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead sports a pretty good one: “When there’s no more
room in Hell, the dead will walk the earth.” I stared for weeks at the lurid
poster bearing these ominous words. It hung in the front windows of the
Maplewood Mall multiplex. Looking back,
I think a more fitting tag-line might have come from a speech given by President
Jimmy Carter later that same summer: “Often you see paralysis and stagnation
and drift. What can we do?”

Carter was addressing what he described as a “crisis of
confidence” in America. His July 15, 1979 address has been called “the malaise
speech” for its focus on the country’s financial woes and lack of
direction. Like Romero’s film, the
speech offered a disturbing vision. It showed a world drained of vitality and
meaning.

What better setting for such a vision than a mall, where the
film’s protagonists hide out to weather the zombie apocalypse? And what better place for me to have seen
this film, in the mall where I was to spend so many pointless afternoons,
wandering the aisles and riding the escalators like Romero’s zombies?

1979 was also the year when my family decided we needed
solutions to our own paralysis and stagnation. We sought it through family
therapy, proudly airing our co-dependencies and dysfunctions, along with many
other American families caught up in the family therapy movement.

Few films expose the limitations of therapy narratives more
ruthlessly than David Cronenberg’s The
Brood. Cronenberg explored the
psychosexual demons haunting the individual human psyche in Shivers and Rabid. He then anatomized the late-70s zeitgeist by turning his attention
to the monsters lurking within the fractured family.

The poster advertising John Frankenheimer’s Prophecy featured a grotesque image of a
monstrous fetal creature wrapped in its placenta. I responded to this image with
equal parts fascination and horror. After
seeing the film, however, I discovered that horror could help me to make sense
of the era’s toxic events. With Prophecy, Frankenheimer wanted to create
an environmentally-conscious horror film that would raise the ethical stakes of
popcorn fare. It can hardly be said that
he succeeded in this goal—the director has blamed his own alcoholism at the
time, as well as production issues, for the film’s relative failure. However,
the film did succeed in presenting images and settings that managed to distill the
toxic environments of the 1970s, at least for one young filmgoer.

Star Wars was
predicated on an escapist premise that used science fiction conventions to
blast us into a galaxy far, far away. In the universe of Alien, on the other hand, space
is confined, claustrophobic. It is a
universe very much like our own, subject to the laws of supply and demand. As we watch a complex mass of space-borne
metal slide slowly across the screen, a superimposed text tells us this is the
commercial towing spaceship Nostromo. The
ship is hauling a refinery and twenty million tons of mineral ore. Space, the final frontier, has become, like
all frontiers, a resource to be exploited.

Although I wasn’t yet old enough to have a driver’s license,
like everyone in 1979 I was highly conscious of rising gas prices and their
effects. I watched those daily images of
gas station lines so long they looked like shanty towns with a grim fascination.
They closely resembled the conjoined images of excess and destitution common to
those post-apocalyptic films I loved from that era. Films like The Omega Man, Damnation Alley, and Soylent
Green seemed half in love with the world’s death. What did the earth that the Nostromo’s crew
were trying to return to actually look like?
Probably something much like the one depicted in these films. The images
I watched on the nightly news seemed to be offering a disturbing preview of
that world.

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: Slow Motion Movie Supercut

LOOK. PAY ATTENTION. NOTICE THE MOVEMENT.

If you grew up during the 1970s, and first came into
sentient moviegoer-ship during the 1980s, then one slow-motion scene
which probably dented your consciousness was the running scene at the beginning
of Chariots of Fire, showing the film’s
two heroes running down a beach to the tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch of a
much-imitated Vangelis soundtrack. The purpose of the slo-mo here turns out to
be one of the key purposes of this technique—to give dignity to an action whose
speed we might otherwise take for granted. The slow motion impresses upon us
the gravity of the movement, its meaning above and beyond mere movement. In the
same way, a director might present someone walking in slow motion to show,
somehow, that the character in question has hit his or her stride; the crooks
of Reservoir Dogs might be leaving brunch to go to work, in one sense, but the
work they are doing is sinister, however darkly and semi-comically confused it
might become after that brunch. Sometimes that slo-mo walk might simply show a
character who is at ease inside her own identity, as in the case of Gwyneth
Paltrow’s Margot, gliding towards her brother to Nico’s frail voice in The Royal Tenenbaums; unhappy as she may
be, she has full possession of her unhappiness. Motion may be slowed down to
draw out the tension of a scene like pulling, pulling, pulling on a rubber band, with the understanding that if
the scene were played in real time, the action might be too explosive for us to
bear—but also raising the question as to whether the motion is so much more
bearable in slowness. Think of the falling carriage in The Untouchables: step,
after step, after step, bullets flying, but achingly, achingly slowly… And yet what about the
cases in which slow motion seems to be presented for its own sake, to show us
the terrible beauty of things blown apart: glass windowpanes, buildings, cars,
even human heads? Or to show us what a bullet looks like as it flies to its
destination, or, as in the case of Wanted, is deflected by Angelina Jolie’s wrist?
Leigh Singer’s video shows us 113 different films featuring slow motion, dating
from 1936 to the present, demonstrating that, above all, the use of the
technique forces us to do what any film worth its salt should do: LOOK. Singer
wisely places a crucial, classic slo-mo scene near the piece’s very end: a shot
of the apes, the earliest human ancestors, pounding bone with bone in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick used
slow motion in this case for one reason, and one reason only, to make sure we
would not forget our history. And at this speed, who could, indeed, forget it?–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.

Max Winter is the Editor of Press Play.

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

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.

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: 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.