Video Essay – Page 31 – Press Play Video Blog

VIDEO ESSAY – The Sight and Sound Film Poll: An International Tribute to Roger Ebert and His Favorite Films

This week Press Play introduces Sight and Sound Film Poll: Critics' Picks, a series of video essays featuring prominent film critics on films they selected for Sight and Sound magazine's poll of the greatest films of all time. New videos will premiere each week until the poll results are announced later this summer.

To start off the Critics' Picks series, why not have the most famous film critic in the world? Roger Ebert needs no introduction, but his impact on film culture is something we have long taken for granted, and extends beyond his 45 years of film reviewing and television celebrity. His reach is felt even within the Sight and Sound Poll – as I wrote in Press Play's roundtable discussion of the poll, it was Ebert who first brought the poll to my attention as a teenager reading his Movie Home Companion, where he analyzed the 1982 poll results and shared his own top ten, distilled in a series of exquisitely crafted paragraphs. That book and those paragraphs initiated my own love of film criticism, and form the basis for this video essay.

The passages that serve as the video's narration cover the four films from Ebert's 1982 list that remain on his freshly minted top ten for the 2012 Sight and Sound poll. In its own way, the video reflects more significant developments in his life than his updated top ten list. When a fight with cancer left Ebert unable to speak, he took to the web to express himself, convening a international community of movie lovers around his website and blog. That in turn led to the creation of a special section on his website, Roger Ebert's Far-Flung Correspondents, featuring film reviews and articles from people around the world. The site celebrates movies as a global phenomenon bringing people together across languages and cultures.

To honor that vision, this video features many of the Far-Flung Correspondents speaking Ebert's words in their own language. The video also reunites the two hosts of Ebert Presents at the Movies, Christy Lemire and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Vishnevetsky bringing a multilingual twist to his voiceover. Also taking part are contributors to Roger Ebert's Demanders, the section of his site reviewing video on-demand titles.

It was extremely fortuitous that the production of this video coincided with Ebertfest, Ebert's personally curated annual film festival held at his alma mater, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Most of the participants of this video travelled to Ebertfest, making it the perfect opportunity to record them. Others recorded themselves remotely and sent their audio via email. All told, there are 20 contributors speaking ten languages, discussing four favorite films of one man whose writing proves that not only great films, but great film writing, can transcend humankind's boundaries. – Kevin B. Lee

Roger Ebert's Far-Flung Correspondents

Ali Arikan (Turkish)
Olivia Collette (Canadian French)
Wael Khairy (Arabic)
Scott Jordan Harris
Michael Mirasol (Tagalog)
Omer Mozaffar
Michal Oleszczyk (Polish)
Krishna Shenoi
Gerardo Valero (Spanish)
Pablo Villaça (Brazilian Portugese)
Grace Wang (Mandarin)

Roger Ebert's Demanders

Steven Boone
Jim Emerson
Odie Henderson
Kevin B. Lee
Donald Liebenson
Jana Monji
Jeff Shannon

Ebert Presents At the Movies

Christy Lemire
Ignatiy Vishnevetsky (Russian)

VIDEO ESSAY: Law and Disorder in Ying Liang’s THE OTHER HALF

Chinese director Ying Liang cannot return to his country. On April 28, Ying debuted his film When Night Falls at the Jeonju International Film Festival in South Korea. The film is based on the true story of Yang Jia, who killed six policemen after allegedly suffering police brutality, and whose trial stirred controversy and protest over the fairness and due process of the legal system in China. After the film was shown in Jeonju, Ying’s family, in Shanghai, and his wife’s family, in Sichuan, were visited by Chinese authorities, who also tried “to buy the rights to the film.” Ying also learned that he would be arrested if he were to return to mainland China. He currently lives and works in Hong Kong, trying to manage the well-being of his relatives back home (asking them to document every interaction with local authorities), as well the fate of his new film.

When Night Falls has brought unprecedented scrutiny and pressure upon Ying Liang, but it’s not the first time his films have offered a sharply critical view of China’s societal dysfunction. Ying’s debut Taking Father Home examined the breakdown of families in the era of migrant labor. Good Cats views labor exploitation from the opposite end, following a young man’s entry into the inner circle of business and corruption in his hometown. Ying’s best feature, The Other Half, is perhaps the most thematically aligned with When Night Falls, as it also deals explicitly with the failure of China’s legal system to address the problems of its people. New Yorker film critic Richard Brody selected The Other Half as one of his ten best films of the 2000s, heralding Ying’s ability to bring a “laser-like analytical eye to the crossroads of private life and oppressive authority.” This video essay further explores the film and Ying’s ability to bring the “other half” of China into a stark spotlight.

Originally published on Fandor. Read a transcript of the video.

Kevin B. Lee is Editor in Chief of IndieWire’s PressPlay Video Blog, Video Essayist for Fandor Keyframe, and contributor to Roger Ebert.com. Follow him on Twitter.

VIDEO ESSAY: DIAL K FOR KUROSAWA

VIDEO ESSAY: Dial K for Kurosawa

The perfect crime, the wrong man, the speeding train, and the surprising MacGuffin. High and Low has all the best elements of a great Alfred Hitchcock film. But it isn’t Hitchcock—it’s Akira Kurosawa, the Japanese director better known for his samurai flicks and complex moral tales.

When Kurosawa adapted works of Western fiction, he often chose from the greats: Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Gorky. But High and Low (1963) is not adapted from a literary giant or even a Japanese author, but a minor 1950s American pulp novel entitled King’s Ransom by Ed McBain. King’s Ransom was part of a series of novels following the stories of the 87^th police precinct, and while it has its literary qualities, the novel’s style bears no resemblance to the serious tone and moral complexity of Kurosawa’s film.

However, one director in Western cinema made his entire career through the meshing of high and low art: Hitchcock. The master’s reputation stemmed from spinning popular murder and suspense stories while engaging critics and scholars with morbid and psychological themes. High and Low feels as much indebted to Hitchcock as Kurosawa’s samurai films show the influence of John Ford’s westerns. Like Hitchcock, Kurosawa explores the roles of duality, ubiquitous guilt, and the incapacity to understand evil in a frightening and ultimately despairing fashion. High and Low ultimately paints a disturbing portrait of humanity, where evil simply exists within each person without explanation, creating a world similar to the sadistic one Hitchcock often presented.

The film seems ripe for comparison to Hitchcock from the opening shot, as the camera never leaves the home of Gondo. Like Rope, Lifeboat, Dial M for Murder, and especially Rear Window, Kurosawa limits himself by never staging a sequence outside of Gondo’s mansion—even the credits are framed from the large window looking down. Other classic Hitchcock tropes play large roles in the film: a train—essential in the narratives of North by Northwest and Shadow of a Doubt—literally bridges the two sections of the film. And we can see intense shadows, symbolic staircases, voyeurism, and grotesque death, other Hitchcock trademarks.

But High and Low’s most noted motif is the use of doubles and opposites as a sign of similarities between good and evil. Strangers on a Train, Shadow of a Doubt, Frenzy, and countless other Hithcock works explored this topic, and Kurosawa forges the same relationship between Gondo and Takeuchi. Kurosawa foreshadows the duality with the use of the two children, who are so identical that Gondo’s wife confuses them when they switch clothes while playing cops and robbers. The children’s outer appearance might suggest their societal roles, but under the surface, both Gondo and Takeuchi are both conniving and malicious—Gondo simply confines his immoral practices to business.

Kurosawa builds this philosophy into the film’s structure. Like Hitchcock’s Psycho, the narrative breaks into two parts with a protagonists in the center of each part. The film’s first half centers around Gondo and his moral dilemma of whether to save Shinichi. The second half of the film focuses on Takeuchi, operating on an opposing plane. Set in multiple locations, often with crowded frames, the genre of the film changes from morality play to police procedural in this part. The film bears down on Takeuichi’s story—his background, identity, and methodology—as the cops investigate and arrest him. When Gondo and Takeuchi meet face-to-face in the film’s final scene, Kurosawa uses the glass to literally reflect their faces onto each other, a technique that recalls the penultimate shot of Psycho as Norman’s mother’s face is superimposed over Norman’s.

So why does such a fate fall on Gondo? In High and Low, the kidnapping narrative is not just set up as coincidence, but as a fate that Gondo is punished for. As soon as the Osaka deal is set, Takeuchi calls almost immediately with news of the kidnapping. The placement of the phone is made to seem not like coincidence but fate—even one of the rival businessmen later reflects that it was “divine retribution.” Gondo hasn’t done anything terribly wrong, but he does recall Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest.. Before Thornhill becomes a case of mistaken identity (as Shinichi is here), we watch him pretending his secretary is ill, to grab a taxi quicker. Thornhill likes playing pretend, and thus his punishment is an extreme version of that.

Plus, Gondo’s not the only one to be punished. During the first half, Akoi, Gondo’s driver, seems like a humble man who deserves to have his son back. But in the second half, we see how poorly he treats his child, and that perhaps deserves the shame. And during the film’s harrowing alley sequence, we watch an addict suffer at the hands of Takeuchi. Her death seems inevitable, but it only happens because the police, the men responsible with her protection, allow it to happen so they may arrest Takeuchi. As Kurosawa’s camera shoots up to reveal her discarded body on the floor, he reveals that the height of evil is also its lowest point.

These ubiquitous punishments of the not-so-innocent relate to the worldview that both Hitchcock and Kurosawa seem to subscribe to: an evil that is ever prevalent and simply incapable of explanation. In Hitchcock, evil is often presented as kindness and without any precise motivation. Psycho’s famous psychiatrist speech has always had a humorous tone to it, more than one of essential exposition. And what motivation could one even begin to ascribe to the titular animals of The Birds?

In the second half of the film, the main narrative tension derives from the mystery surrounding the identity of the kidnapper and his rationale. The fact that High and Low leaves the spectator with an unsatisfactory answer is only more significant in examining the evil that surrounds the film. Takeuchi turns out to be a simple medical intern who is also a drug dealer, but nothing establishes him as a unique case. In the last sequence, he reveals that he wanted Gondo present to show that he was not afraid to die, but he soon screams in anguish, making him more pathetic than villainous.

The final moment in High and Low, where Gondo stares at his own image, answers the question of where such evil lies. Hitchcock suggested this answer too, but so often, his endings left us with a smile. Kurosawa never mentioned the influence of Hitchcock in any of his interviews, but I can’t imagine watching this modern day crime story and not think of the master of suspense. Kurosawa may have seen Hitchcock’s cinema, but instead of exiting the theater with a smile, he would have left with a chilled face.

And whatever happened to Ed McBain, the author who inspired this masterpiece? His real name was Evan Hunter, and he went on to write a little film called The Birds.

Peter Labuza is a film writer in New York City, originally from Minnesota. He has written for Indiewire, Film Matters, the CUArts Blog, the Columbia Daily Spectator, and MNDialog. He will be attending Columbia University in the fall for a Master in Film Studies, focusing on the history of American film genres. He currently blogs about film at www.labuzamovies.com. You can also follow him on Twitter.

Click here to donate to the NFPF!

In 2011, the New Zealand Film Archive discovered part of The White Shadow, a film directed by Graham Cutts, and written, edited, and assistant directed by the legendary Alfred Hitchcock. The first three reels of this lost work have been arduously restored, but the film has only had a single public screening. For this year’s For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon, we are asking for donations to the National Film Preservation Foundation. If we can raise $15,000, the Foundation will provide free streaming of The White Shadow for four months, and record a new score by Michael Motilla. To donate, simply click here. And for more information on the blogathon, please visit Ferdy on Films, the Self-Styled Siren, and This Island Rod. Every donation counts, and we thank you for your continued support of film.

GIRLS RECAP 5: HARD BEING EASY

More like "Hard Writing Consistently." What was that?

For four episodes, Girls has stayed on the right side of believable. Not likeable or admirable, necessarily, when it came to the three leads and their behavior (I'll excuse Shoshanna from the discussion for the time being), but we don't have to like characters, or find them attractive physically or emotionally, to see something familiar in them and in the situations they move through. Our interest in a narrative isn't always about comfort, or escape. Sometimes, it's about recognition. I wouldn't characterize Girls as holding a pitiless mirror up to a generation or anything, but I think it gets at certain truths that lie underneath (and/or in) the pretension and self-absorption and unprofessional bumbling, or at least it tries to.

I don't know what "Hard Being Easy" was trying to do, besides annoy/baffle the audience. (Mission accomplished.) The episode has a handful of neatly observed moments, and the usual complement of too-awkward-to-watch bits . . . but the awkwardness didn't come from the characters this week. It came from Lena Dunham losing control of the material.

The Marnie/Charlie storyline picks up shortly after the end of the last episode, and it's well done—but it has to climb uphill from a ridonkulous beginning in which Charlie forces Hannah to read aloud from the journal in front of him and Marnie. Hannah goes along with this, despite the fact that 1) Charlie (well, mostly Ray, but whatever) violated her privacy, 2) Marnie threw a drink on her and called her a bitch, 3) neither of them apologized, and 4) whatever Hannah's involvement, the only credible action for any character would be to hole up elsewhere until the couple's storm blew over. And Hannah not only goes along with it, she corrects them, saying it's "notes for a book," not a journal, and asks for feedback on the writing. Yes, Hannah lives in her own bellybutton, but this isn't believable behavior from anyone.

The rest of Marnie's subplot resonates, though, from Ray overplaying the loyal-best-bud card, to the revelation that Marnie has never gone to Charlie's apartment (once there, she admiringly notes that it looks like "a Target ad"), to the flashback to college in which Marnie and Charlie meet. Marnie has taken an unknown drug at a party and is disappearing down a paranoia-hole. Hannah tends to her for a while, then heads off to dance with Elijah (to the Scissor Sisters, after Elijah "curates" Marnie's bangs with a flick of his forefinger. . . . Hannah really thought that guy was straight? For two years?), leaving Charlie to mind Marnie. The narrative pun on "high maintenance" aside, it makes perfect sense that this is how they met, that Charlie ministered to her from the beginning. (Charlie's wig, however, is inexplicable. I get why the actor is wearing one, but—that one? Did Charlie just come from an '80s-Stamos-impersonator contest?)

Their break-up/make-up/break-up talk the next day is dead-on. Marnie turns up in "my party dress and my sorry face," sure that she can change his mind. Charlie points out repeatedly that she isn't in love with him anymore; she asks repeatedly that he not break up with her. We've all had that convo, fumbling and protracted, desperate not to rip the Band-Aid off because "better the devil you know" and all that. This is where Marnie's at with it, refusing to admit the facts (and probably thinking she'd have been the one to do the dumping). Charlie purposely wounds her by saying he thought he recognized her at the party from a porn flick, Sophomore Sluts; she's shocked that he watches porn. (Ladies: they alllll watch porn. Even the Charlies. It's usually nothing pathological; please stop taking this personally. Thanks.) After she offers him the blowjobs she should be giving him anyway, they end up in his low-ceilinged bed nook, having sex, and he orders her to be nice to his friends and "act like [his] life is real." She agrees. He asks her to keep her face close to his. She does. Then he says either "say 'I love you'" or "stay; I love you"; either way, Marnie physically recoils, saying she can't, and whangs her head on the roof of the bed-nook. Immediately Charlie sits up to make sure she's okay: "I'm right here. I'm riiiight here." That's the problem, of course, and she whispers that she wants to break up.

And this is the least awkward sex in the episode.

Jessa gets it on with an ex-boyfriend, a subplot that seems to exist solely so the two of them can burst into Jessa and Shoshanna's apartment, pawing each other, before Shoshanna can announce herself or vacate. Shosh has to hide behind an Ikea curtain for the duration. The ex gets a high-dudgeon line about "a very tumultuous relationship in which one's Vespa gets destroyed for no reason" that I chuckled at; everything else flopped. Jessa finally notices Shoshanna and teases her for being a creeper, and Shoshanna, always talking at a high rate of speed prior to this point, doesn't say a word to contradict her. . . . What? We got the "virgin is both attracted and repelled" note last week, and we don't watch the show for slapstick—fortunately, since slapstick is demonstrably not its strength. What is this story doing?

Perhaps it's an effort to postpone the inevitable boinkfest between Jessa and Jeff Lavoyt—and that part of Jessa's story this week is sharp. Jessa's in the Lavoyts' bathroom, getting ready to meet the ex; Lavoyt's leaning boyfriendily in the doorway. Mrs. Lavoyt comes upon them there, chatting, and Kathryn Hahn is excellent in the scene, holding the awkward silence exactly the right amount of time, lying that it's okay that Jessa is using her lipstick ( . . . of course she is) because she doesn't want to come off like an unhip harridan.

It's also not really okay that Jessa, hearing about Hannah's boss's handsiness, suggests that Hannah "should hump" Richard "for the story." It's a hundred percent something Jessa would do, and most likely get away with, because she's a confident beauty who wears a kimono to her babysitting job. It's a hundred percent not something Hannah, as written to this point, would do, but, for reasons I can't fathom, she does it. Yeah, yeah, "for the story"—I don't see it. And based on the too-long, all-over-the-place scene that results, Dunham didn't either. Richard asks Hannah for a turkey sandwich; she tells him to cut the crap, because she knows he wants to fuck her. I write in my notebook, "Oh, this is a dream sequence." It isn't, and it's interminable, Hannah insisting that it's what Richard wants, Richard asking if she's high, Hannah switching gears and threatening to sue, Richard snorting that "there's no suing app on your iPhone" but adding that he's not going to fire her because she's "great," Hannah offering to forget about suing for one thousand dollars . . . it just. Keeps. Going. Richard is still trying to convince her to calm down and go back to work when Hannah whines, "I just tried to fuck you, sue you, and extort you! I'm fuckin' nuts, why would you want me in your office?" Perhaps that's Dunham signaling that she knows the twist is ridiculous, but the plot doesn't work, as farce or as commentary. (Hannah's big kiss-off line—"Someday I'm gonna write an essay about you? And I am not gonna change your name. And then you can sue me"—is just weak.)

Alas, the script isn't finished taking an idea over the top and then not knowing how to get back—but like others in the ep, this week's Hannah/Adam sequence starts from an interesting premise about the things we choose to hear. Hannah goes over to Adam's house to find him wearing a shirt. . . . Just kidding. He never, ever wears a shirt. At this point, I know that guy's nips better than I know my own. When Hannah tells him what went down at work (sort of; she says "there was a sex scandal"), he grunts, "Sometimes you say shit that sounds made up"—an on-point comment, since she's also "made up" the idea that her straight talk in the prior episode (and their ensuing intercourse) has bonded them into a couple. "Surprise": Adam didn't hear it that way. What he heard is her saying they shouldn't have sex anymore. But then you kissed me, Hannah points out. "Because you were sad," Adam shrugs. And then we had sex, she points out. "Because we were kissing," Adam duhs, before telling her, "These things have an expiration date—six months or until you stop having fun," and Hannah isn't.

That 100-monkeys-typing brand of observation, simultaneously precise and insensitive, is one of the things that makes the Adam character ring true for me. Hannah, trying to make Adam jealous by over-sharing that she "almost" fucked Richard, buys time with a trip to the bathroom, and as she sits on the toilet, her eyes well up. She's wearing another dress that doesn't suit her—she looks like a hacky-sack with bad posture—and all of that rings true for me too.

But then she comes out to find Adam in his bedroom, jerking it. That he's doing it while Hannah's still there, after turning her down for sex, is galling, as she notes, but it's still in character for both of them—and it's still in character that she can't make herself get angry and/or leave. But then Adam prompts her to verbally abuse him as a turn-on, and she goes along with it, and the scene is once again too long and too aimless, and Dunham’s direction doesn’t illuminate why Hannah is doing this or what she's feeling about it, and when Hannah demands cab fare as part of the "you're a bad boy" stroke-fest, it loses me completely. I don't buy Adam as the masochist when he's gotten off on degrading dirty talk in the past, I don't buy Hannah taking control in this fashion, and the editing is a hash, but the primary problem is a flatness. The scene feels calculated to provoke, theoretical.

That's the ep as a whole. The plots begin with recognizable situations, but veer into almost academic explorations: what if we said this, what if we made her do that, wouldn't it be funny if the other thing. It's not the lack of "realism" (realism isn't always good storytelling, vis. the sixth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the accurate but repetitive downward spiral of its heroine). It's that I can't relate to these situations, or these characters in them, and based on the faltering humor and tempo of the episode, I'm not sure Dunham could relate to them either.

Sarah D. Bunting co-founded TelevisionWithoutPity.com, and has written for Seventeen, New York Magazine, MSNBC.com, Salon, Yahoo!, and others. She's the chief cook and bottle-washer at TomatoNation.com.

VIDEO ESSAY – Deceptive Surfaces: The Films of Christian Petzold

If one wants to call Christian Petzold the most important German filmmaker of the last decade, it’s because his films operate on multiple levels whose complexities lie just beneath a deceptively simple surface.

On a basic level, his recent films, like Yella, Jerichow, and Dreileben: Beats Being Dead, work as entertaining dramas centered on themes of sex, greed, and loyalty. The major characters are all driven by the desire for a better life, and they give each film a restless, seeking energy. But they find themselves caught between different worlds. In Yella, a woman from economically depressed eastern Germany seeks a promising career in western venture capital, but the past catches up with her in the form of her estranged, down-on-his-luck husband. In Jerichow, an unemployed ex-soldier finds work with a Turkish businessman, only to fall for his German wife. In Beats Being Dead, an ambitious medical intern with falls in love with a working class Bosnian refugee.

Read the rest of the transcript at Fandor.

Kevin B. Lee is Editor in Chief of IndieWire’s PressPlay Video Blog, Video Essayist for Fandor Keyframe, and contributor to Roger Ebert.com. Follow him on Twitter.

VIDEO ESSAY: Depp Shadows: Tim Burton’s Cinema

“Basically Johnny Depp is playing Tim Burton in all his movies.” – Scott Rudin (Producer of Sleepy Hollow)

This ubiquitous quote by Rudin is often the throwaway summation found in most writings on, and dissections of, the cinematic works of Tim Burton with Johnny Depp. Which is a shame, really. The quote is not only too broad—it’s blazingly deceptive. Unlike other repeated director-actor pairings (from Martin Scorsese-Robert De Niro to Pedro Almodovar-Penelope Cruz), each succeeding film in the Burton-Depp canon actually becomes less about “digging” into an unknown abyss (e.g. as Scorsese faced male insecurity in Raging Bull and Almodovar celebrated female power over male dominance in Volver) than about the overall art direction of each film. Even though Burton’s prolific filmography boasts its share of critically (Big Fish) and financial successful (Planet of the Apes) non-Depp-starring movies, it’s worth studying the pattern behind those eight Burton-Depp projects. All together, those eight films have broken numerous box office records and have catapulted Burton into a tier of top-dollar directors. Currently, Burton is one of the few directors who could harness a towering financial investment from a studio in order to bring to any stylized, eye-pleasing idea he has to life. In fact, if one were to examine the Burton-Depp filmography from top to bottom, it’s quite easy to see the shift from the personal to the pizzazz-filled.

Burton’s first two films with Depp are still his strongest and best works because each film subtly emoted shades of its creator: the shy, social outcast in Edward Scissorhands and the ambitious young filmmaker in Ed Wood. Even with impressive set pieces and dazzling costume design, both films were dominated by Johnny Depp’s carefully nuanced performances. It was the perfect marriage between Burton’s striking, visual storytelling and Depp’s risk-taking performance-art-style acting. Even though most films employ such marriages of talents, Scissorhands and Wood are unique in that they operate on two levels: the surface level looks and sounds like big budget Hollywood but (after repeated viewings) the pulse and internal workings of those films speak to more personal truths (i.e. the anxieties of the outcast), largely because Depp and Burton channeled one another’s sensibilities toward the material, thus giving those films a palpable vitality.

But then something happened. On their third collaboration, Sleepy Hollow, signs of a new Burton cinema began to emerge. This new Tim Burton cinema canon was more concerned with pushing the boundaries of its production design. In Sleepy Hollow, Depp’s (oft-underappreciated) turn as a morbidly grossed-out Ichabod Crane takes a backseat to the moody set pieces and strong work by the FX team. Gone were the quirky tableside manners of Scissorhands or cross-dressing revelations of Wood; in their place were the technically accomplished renderings of ghouls and the gothic. And Burton’s next two live-action films, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Sweeney Todd (both remakes), pushed the eye-candy envelope even further. Chocolate Factory basically forced Depp to become a peripheral player in the Burton blueprint of euphoric, candy-centric visualizations. Although Depp scored a Best Actor nomination for Sweeney Todd, his performance—which largely depended on Depp’s ability to always look sullen—is hardly a return to his intimate, versatile turns in Burton’s earlier works. Todd was based on a revered musical, and Depp rose to the occasion with singing chops; Burton turned in some strong visionary work once again (the bloody and bestial barbershop is a beaut), winning Burton the Best Director prize from the National Board of Review. So there’s that.

The real abomination came after the pair’s animated stint in Corpse Bride (which rehashed the stop-motion gothic fare of the Burton-produced Nightmare Before Christmas) and ironically enough became their biggest commercial success: Alice In Wonderland. A mammoth at the box office but overall critical dud, what Wonderland proved was that the new Burton-Depp formula had reached an apex. Early Burton films like Scissorhands had embedded themselves in pop culture to the point where audiences were simply content with knowing that Johnny Depp would be playing an unusual Burton-esque character in an unusual Burton-esque universe (a world somewhere between a Halloween-themed prom and alternate dimension “Saturn” from Beetlejuice). And it’s not that Burton doesn’t know how to make a surefire blockbuster that is also his own singular work of art (see Batman). In the end, the massively financially successful groove that Burton and Depp are in is probably the natural progression that some artists can make after churning out those intimate stories about dying (Beetlejuice), isolation (Edward Scissorhands) and finding your bicycle (Pee-wee’s Big Adventure). So if the latest Burton-Depp vehicle, Dark Shadows, is not a return to earlier form for the pair, at least it will deliver unmatched art direction and unrivaled commercial success. And if that’s the case, maybe Depp really is playing Burton in all of his movies; only now Burton isn’t the isolated, hungry filmmaker he once was.

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."

VIDEO ESSAY – Utopia Online?

Director Sam Green knows a few things about utopia. His Oscar-nominated 2002 film The Weather Underground chronicled the film’s titular radical group’s violent path towards creating an ideal society; his new film The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, which screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival, revisits the futurist designer’s attempts to transform the landscape of the San Francisco Bay.

Green’s utopian impulses not only affect the subjects he chooses to film, but also how he presents them to his audience. In 2009, Green and Dave Cerf went on a world tour of live screenings of four short films all dealing with Utopia, presented with live narration by Green and a live musical accompaniment performed by the band The Quavers. The touring show, known as Utopia in Four Movements, brought a fresh gust of innovation and energy to the theatrical experience of cinema, at a time when movie theaters are trying to reinvent themselves in the age of online movies. Green will continue his “live documentary” work by offering an in-person cinematic narration with live accompaniment by the band Yo La Tengo at his SFIFF screening of The Love Song of Buckminster Fuller.

What does it mean, then, that some of the short films from Green’s innovative Utopia performances are now available to watch online? The occasion makes one pause to reflect on the qualitative differences between the theatrical and online experiences of movies. The point is raised by an essay by Rebecca Solnit, in which she posits the movie theater experience as a utopia in danger of fading out as online, small screen modes of viewing threaten to replace them:

A lot of us now look back at the golden age of cinema as a bygone paradise, a minor but sublime coexistence of strangers in the dark drawn together to see a flicker of projected light come to life onscreen. Television chopped up movies with commercials and put them in the middle of domestic distraction, but that was nothing compared to this moment when films are on your iPhone and your laptop and in fuzzy tiny windows on YouTube. The worst thing about these new modes of viewing isn’t that they diminish cinema as visual and imaginative spectacle. The worst thing is that they’re watched furtively and alone. Cinema, which was once a great banquet in a dream palace is now often a snack devoured absentmindedly in isolation. And only in society, only together, do we have the power to live out those old dreams, or new ones. Is watching movies online a solitary, un-social experience that smacks of absent-minded consumption and a diminished appreciation of what’s being watched?

The following video is offered as a counterpoint to show what special qualities can be gotten from watching a movie online, in a way that demonstrates interactivity, sociability and an enhanced appreciation of the movies. It is also filmed in real time, as a way to pay tribute to the live, in-the-moment experience experienced in Green’s Utopia performances. Perhaps the real point of this video is that, whether you’re in a movie theater or in front of a computer, the experience of being “live,” like utopia itself, may not be tied to a place, but to a state of mind.

Originally published on Fandor.

Kevin B. Lee is Editor in Chief of IndieWire’s PressPlay Video Blog, Video Essayist for Fandor Keyframe, and contributor to Roger Ebert.com. Follow him on Twitter.

AUDIOVISUALCY: How to “Perform” the Video Essay

In “La caméra-stylo: Notes on Video Criticism and Cinephilia” , Christian Keathley argues persuasively that the current landscape of video essays, including commercial DVD supplements and web-embedded features, is defined by a continuum of explanatory and poetical works. Explanatory video essays follow a thesis and are language-based: “Images and sounds – even when carefully and creatively manipulated in support of an argument – are subordinated to explanatory language.” Essays that lean more towards the poetical register, by contrast, are driven by the basic language of cinema: “These videos resist a commitment to the explanatory mode, allowing it to surface only intermittently, and they employ language sparingly, and even then as only one, unprivileged component.”

Keathley’s text provides a useful framework to assess the video essay as an emerging form of criticism. And it emphasizes that it is more than just an explanation or a poetic meditation. It is a performance piece. The critic uses the film’s very own properties to write cinematically (hence the reference to Alexandre Astruc’s pioneering concept of the caméra-stylo). But, more than that, the critic also uses her voice, her actual voice, in addition to prose, both written and cinematic. Voice-over commentary, the way an essay is narrated, has a profound effect on its impact.

The essay that we are highlighting today is one of the most beautiful examples of the form, and not simply because it remediates a film by Steven Spielberg (and a longtime project by Stanley Kubrick). A.I. Artificial Intelligence – A Visual Study, produced by Benjamin Sampson, a doctoral candidate in the cinema and media studies department at UCLA, is an exploration of some of the titular film’s essential themes and aesthetics. It projects a lucid and cohesive argument with captivating imagery. Sampson uses minimal voice-over. He chooses his words carefully and the deliberate pace and soft pitch with which he narrates the essay lend the presentation a nostalgic, almost magical note.

The essay is, overall, driven by an aesthetically judicious style. The themes are broached verbally, but the full communication occurs via the film’s scenes and Sampson’s own editorial work. Except for chapter breaks and the credits, the essay uses no textual inserts and instead relies on elegantly rendered dissolves, split screen effects, and superimpositions. Sampson manages to create an aesthetic space where the film comments upon itself. The essay seems so natural, so organic, it could be mistaken for a poetic, explanatory epilogue. This is probably why it prompted me to revisit Spielberg’s film, to find new appreciation for it. Is this not the best kind of criticism? Beautiful, stimulating, impactful, all the while in sync with the work it critiques. A.I. Artificial Intelligence – A Visual Study inspires new or awakens old curiosity about the film. And it does so by virtue of an exceptional performance.

Matthias Stork is a film scholar and filmmaker from Germany who is studying film and television at UCLA. He has an M.A. in Education with an emphasis on American and French literature and film from Goethe University, Frankfurt. He has attended the Cannes film festival twice (2010/2011) as a representative of Goethe University's film school. You can read his blog here.

VIDEO ESSAY: BLACK SUNDAY: Three Reasons for Criterion Consideration

VIDEO ESSAY: Burton versus Bava

Just as people ultimately judge a book by its cover, many of us are quick to judge a film by its trailer. When I was asked to set my sights on Tim Burton's upcoming Dark Shadows, a movie based on the cult TV show of the late 1960s, as my next entry point for Criterion Consideration, I immediately knew where my judgment would most likely fall. I might find it hard to veil my contempt for Burton's recent work. His early films had a profound impact on my childhood and may very well be responsible for who I am today, but as I became an adult Burton began rewriting the rest of my childhood in ways that make me confused and horrified. Remaking the classic films from my youth, Burton has me questioning my admiration. Also, with the upcoming release of his animated Frankenweenie, Burton has begun remaking himself. We could list his later films and describe how the themes and storylines are still consistent with his earlier work, so maybe I just grew out of him. Now, every time I see one of his films, I end up screaming at the screen, vowing never to see the next Tim Burton film. Still, I cannot deny that his films are intriguing, innovative, and entertaining, if not infuriating. In his collaborations with Johnny Depp, Burton has given us classics likeEdward Scissorhands and Ed Wood, capturing some of the finest performances from Depp in eight films thus far, but I wish that Johnny would begin to show more discretion. Shilling for Burton in promotional videos, Johnny admits to instigating him to collaborate on "a vampire film," citing the classics of German Expressionism, Universal Horror films from the 1930s, and the Hammer Studio films as an influence for this new adaptation. Thankfully all those classics of cinema are thrown into the meaningless mess of Dark Shadows. Sporting the worst make-up job since Alice in Wonderland, Depp's Barnabas Collins struts in front of the living legends of horror cinema, including a direct (slap in the) face-to-face cameo with Jonathan Frid (who played the original character on the TV show). Even before I saw the trailer for Dark Shadows, I knew there would most likely be a nod to Mario Bava's first film, Black Sunday (or The Mask of Satan from its original title La maschera del demonio). Burton has been vocal about Bava's influence, and over a decade ago there were rumors that he would remake Black Sunday. That never exactly came to be, but Burton did evoke a lot from the film for his adaptation of Sleepy Hollow, which unmistakably borrows Bava's visual style.

One of the most important directors in the horror genre, Mario Bava began his career as a cinematographer for Roberto Rossellini during the Italian Neo-Realist movement. He first learned the tools of the trade from his father Eugenio Bava, who was an expert on special effects and also a cameraman. Mario then was contracted by Galatea Studios, where his skills as a photographer, as well as his ability to work quickly and efficiently, would bring many of the studio’s films to life with stunning chiaroscuro. His films always show a deep understanding of the history of the horror genre, with its strange settings and eerie environments, and a weird and wonderful worldview that would become Bava's trademark style. That style would later influence many notable directors, such as Ridley Scott (Alien), Joe Dante (The Howling), and Burton himself, in Sleepy Hollow. In the late 50s, Bava would have to complete principle photography for Riccardo Freda, who abandoned his directorial duties on I Vampiri (Lust of the Vampire) because of the tight shooting schedule. Bava would do the same thing again with Freda's Caltiki, The Immortal Monster in 1959. To show his gratitude, Galatea's producer, Lionello Santi, allowed Bava to choose his (official) directorial debut, which was the adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's short story The Vij. While evoking the traditional story of witchcraft and vampirism at the heart of Gogol’s tale, Bava simultaneously paid his respect to the classic Universal Studios' horror films and the (then) contemporary Hammer Horror films with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Black Sunday relies heavily on the pantheon of 1930's horror, while including the eroticism and gimmicky gore of the new horror wave, creating one of the most beautiful and disturbing horror films of all time.

The film begins with a prologue, describing the superstitious tradition that one day in every century, Satan is allowed to walk the Earth, and his evil disciples can haunt and torment their descendants. We are introduced to Princess Asa (Barbara Steele, a dead-ringer for Tim Burton's old muse, Lisa Marie) and her lover Javutich (Arturo Dominici) while they are standing trial by the Inquisition for acts of Satan worship and witchcraft. Asa is branded with the mark of a witch, before having the iron mask of Satan nailed to her face. Such a gruesome beginning was a standard shock tactic of the time, to keep audiences hooked from the start, but this particular opening was considered so shocking that the British Film Board banned the film for seven years after its release. Before Princess Asa is put to rest, she vows to return from beyond the grave to seek revenge on her family for condemning her to the Inquisition. Two centuries later, doctors Kruvajan (Andrea Checchi) and Gorobek (John Richardson) are traveling to Moscow when their carriage conveniently breaks down next to Asa's tomb. After a slight scuffle with an enormous (and barely visible) bat, Dr. Kruvajan accidentally breaks open her coffin, allowing Princess Asa to return from the grave to torment and acquire the body from her living-image descendant Katia Vajda (also played by Steele). Her father, Prince Vajda (Ivo Garrani), is the only member who still believes the family's sordid history, and he becomes instantly aware that Asa has returned when he sees the ghostly vision of her mask in his evening cup of tea. Once Asa summons Javutich from his grave, she hypnotizes Kruvajan to help her exact revenge and take over Katia's body.

Filming in gorgeous black and white, Mario Bava was both the cinematographer and the director for Black Sunday, which has proven to be more than just a meaningless homage to the Universal visual standard. In the decades before Bava’s film, horror had become the subject of parody and pastiche. Classic monster figures suddenly had brides, reverted back to teenagers, and had mutated into radioactive amalgamations, thanks to a wave of low-budget science-y gimmicks. Bava's chiaroscuro masterpiece harkened back to a simpler time, when horror relied on tense atmospheric emotions, technical skills and claustrophobic mise-en-scene and blocking. Bava was able to accomplish this entirely on the Galatea backlot, utilizing the masters’ techniques with a distinctively innovative approach. Keeping his camera on a dolly at all times, the film moves with restless fluidity, creating an ambience unmatched in its time. When Kruvajan first arrives at Vajda Castle, the camera tracks through endless corridors and secret-passageways before leading him to Asa's tomb. It's sometimes hard to believe that Bava was able to create such a genuinely creepy atmosphere entirely on set, but his technical background elevated all the tired horror tropes to engaging new levels. Bava also found an excellent leading lady in Barbara Steele, who would later become the scream queen of Italian horror because of Black Sunday. Notoriously difficult to work with, Steele created problems for Bava in every regard. Costumes had to be changed or altered, false vampire teeth had to be remolded (then only to be removed from the film completely), and once Steele refused to come on set because she was convinced the Italians had developed a camera that could shoot through clothing. But even she remembered fondly Bava's ability as a director and as a cameraman. Somewhat shy about her status as a horror icon, she attributes her standing to Bava and what he was able to accomplish with Black Sunday.

Bava's magnificently malicious worldview still stands the test of time and hasn't aged a day in light of recent splatter-filled gore-fests currently pass as cinema. Perhaps it is because Bava's films helped usher in subsequent movements in the horror genre that Black Sunday remains untarnished and undated. His later film Black Sabbath (with horror legend Boris Karloff) is credited with starting the Italian giallo films and the American slasher movement. With so many directors indebted to Bava's films, it’s no surprise that a director like Tim Burton would return to Bava again and again for inspiration. Whether Burton will decide to remake Black Sunday remains to be seen, but if that should ever happen it will only allow the next generation of filmmakers to fully embrace Mario Bava's original film. Naturally, I would never want Burton to actually reboot Bava's film, since he would most likely set the film in the American 1960s, needlessly inserting some appalling 80s-style comedy. Maybe before Burton's Dark Shadows is released on DVD, Criterion will seize the chance to bring Black Sunday to Blu-Ray, a format in which it so desperately needs to be seen. If Criterion chooses the film, it would categorize Black Sunday as a superior work, allowing all of us film hipsters to say, "I told you so" and put directors like Tim Burton in their place. In the meantime, if you're looking to avoid the long lines at the cinema for Dark Shadows, I highly recommend watching Black Sunday first. It will not disappoint.

Robert Nishimura is a Japan-based filmmaker, artist, and freelance designer. His designs can be found at Primolandia Productions. You can follow him on Twitter here.

VIDEO – Motion Studies #34: John Cook’s SLOW SUMMER Revisited

The Oberhausen International Short Film Festival presents "Film Studies in Motion", a Web Series curated by Volker Pantenburg and Kevin B. Lee. This series, available on the festival's website and Facebook page, presents weekly selections of analytical video essays on the web, in preparation for Pantenberg and Lee's presentation "Whatever happened to Bildungsauftrag? – Teaching cinema on TV and the Web", scheduled for April 28 at the festival.

Episode 7: Critics and Scholars on Video

The online video essay format opened a new playing field for critical and scholarly analysis of movies, providing opportunities for innovative explorations of films while also challenging the established conventions and limitations of text-based film criticism and scholarship. In its early stages, the video essay format was legitimized by the involvement of such prominent critics as Jonathan Rosenbaum and Matt Zoller Seitz and scholars such as Nicole Brenez and Kristin Thompson. One characteristic of these early videos is that they often resembled narrations of written texts with the video serving a secondary role as illustration. Over time, the relationship between text and media has evolved into more sophisticated works that seek to fully utilize the potential of the medium to illuminate itself. As more people continue to adopt the medium to advance their scholarship, the creative and analytical possibilities of this emerging genre will continue to evolve.

Today's selection:

John Cook's Slow Summer Revisited

Michael Baute, Volker Pantenburg, Stefan Pethke (2008)

View all Motion Studies video selections.

Volker Pantenburg is assistant professor for moving images at the media faculty of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

Kevin B. Lee is Editor in Chief of IndieWire’s PressPlay Video Blog, Video Essayist for Fandor Keyframe, and contributor to Roger Ebert.com. Follow him on Twitter.