Back in New York after

Back in New York after a weekend in DC. First things first: Invites are out for the preview screening of Souvenir November 2001 on June 3rd. Send email if you’re interested in joining us.

Sent off the application for the Montreal International Festival New Cinema New Media (is that the name? Honestly, I can’t tell which combination of “Festival International Nouveaux Cinema Nouveaux Medias Montreal” in Eng/Fra is actually the title.) For the first time, though, I included production stills. To print these out from the DV files, I just pointed Kinko’s to my ftp site. They cranked out a bunch of 8×10 glossies that, frankly, surprised me with their quality. There’s something about a pile of slightly curled black&white production stills that makes me feel legit. (Of course, the motherlode collection of film stills is at The Museum of Modern Art. They have over four million stills, which used to be available in NYC to researchers and the public. Not now. With the closing of the Manhattan museum for construction, the film stills collection has been moved. This caused quite a scandal, which was reported in the NY Observer. I’ll add a deep link when their search function is working.)

The weekend: Since our current pad in Washington is right above the Iwo Jima Memorial, we had frontrow seats to Rolling Thunder, a massive MIA-POW biker rally that culminated in 450,000 bikers rolling on the Pentagon Sunday morning. They filled those massive parking lots (and all the freeways around) with choppers. Pretty impressive. Of course, the Pentagon was between us and church that morning, so we got an extended appreciation of the scale of the rally. If they were selling Jane Fonda paraphernalia, my guess is it wasn’t her aerobics tape. (on C-SPAN Radio we heard a number of VietNam vet/bikers express their still-smouldering hatred for “Hanoi Jane.”)

The end of the month

The end of the month means a rush of festival submission deadlines. Today I shipped off entries for the Mill Valley Film Festival (in northern CA) and the Palm Springs International Festival of Short Films (down south). Also in the works: Venice (the big one), Montreal (the cool one), Tahoe (the crunchy one), Indianapolis (the sweet one), and Sarajevo (the darkhorse; a movie about the aftermath of violent destruction could either resonate or repulse).

Monday we went to


Monday we went to a screening of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 3, the fifth (and longest) of his five-film series. Richard Serra (co-)stars. Using Barney’s favored medium, Vaseline, he re-enacts his Splash series (from 1968-70)–where he threw molted lead against the juncture of floor and wall (actually, against what looks like a small Prop piece, a series of precariously balanced metal slabs he also started around that time).
Here is Serra’s bio on the Guggenheim site.Here is an image of a 1992 Splash work, although you may have to go to the DePont main site and work your way down to it. These pieces date from right around Barney’s birth. Or, more precisely, the start of Serra’s career dates from right around Barney’s birth. There’s more where that came from, if you’re interested.

All in all, I was glad to see at least half of it. It was certainly well produced. Marvell didn’t write “If we had world enough and budget” for a reason. Knowing that you’re going to sell your props for mid-six figure sums no doubt liberates a director from some concerns. But it’s the same dilemma that comes from digital filmmaking: now there’s no reason you can’t see your vision realized on the screen. Or as Abbas Kiarostami said it in the interview I linked to yesterday:

Now, this digital camera makes it possible for everybody to pick it up, like a pen. If you have the right vision, and you think you’re an instinctive filmmaker, there’s no hindrance anymore. You just pick it up, like a pen, and work with it. I predict that, in the next century, there will be an explosion of interest in filmmaking, and that will be the impact of the digital camera.

I just now noticed that Kiarostami doesn’t necessarily predict an explosion of interest in seeing these untethered visions, just in making them. I worry that Barney may face a similar situation.

Information architecture question continued from

Information architecture question continued from the last post: Using the content of the weblog itself as a starting point, I created the directory of films and directors I’ve referenced and turned it into a navigation tool. When I’ve only mentioned a director (e.g., Paul Thomas Anderson) without specifying a film, I’ve left it off for now. We’ll see how it works. I feel comfortable with this method of mining the archives, though. Still working on the best way to highlight non-production, non-film entries. They may eventually sort themselves into “art” and “about me” categories.


There’s no clean category for rants about some of my domain names expiring unexpectedly, throwing my sites into chaos for 3-5 days (I’m told), so I’ll leave that story for another web log.

Just got back from the

Just got back from the Tribeca Film Festival screening of The Director’s Cut of Cinema Paradiso. What’s the difference? Well, Giuseppe Tornatore originally released a 155-minute version of the film, which went unnoticed, then it got cut down to 123 minutes or so. That’s when it won Cannes, Cesars, Igors, and the Oscar. So obviously, the thing to do is put back not only the missing 20 minutes, but an additional 15 minutes on top of that.

So what’s the difference in the story? In the movie experience? Since I can’t think of a reason why you shouldn’t know the story (It’s been 13 years, after all. How long are we supposed to keep a secret?), I’ll spoil it for you. When Toto/Salvatore goes back to his hometown for Alfredo’s funeral, he finds, meets, comisserates, and hooks up with the grown-up Elena, his long-lost teenage love. The whole reason they were separated turns out to be the saintly Alfredo, who told Elena to forget Toto and not look back. That’s the big difference.

But as Vincent Vega wisely noted, It’s the little differences. Toto’s first sexual encounter is with the ‘ho who turns tricks in the movies (and who gives him a nod years later outside Alfredo’s funeral); the sister’s married, with kids; Elena’s parents were very involved and opposed to the kids’ relationship; Toto’s stint in the army was due to a bureaucratic error; he changed his name to make movies. It all adds up to more information and character exposition, but far a less coherent narrative arc and a much muddier emotional mandate. Toto’s less likable, Alfredo’s more meddling and less sympathetic, and Elena’s, well, she can’t live up to the idealized, true love that lived in Toto’s mind (and that drove Toto to make his films). It was interesting to see the movie as a complex but ultimately negative example of a director’s unfettered vision. That the shortest version could be “pulled” from the longer version, that it could be so completely different in its emotional nuances was very instructive.

One last point: The setting of the film–in the aftermath of WWII–and the family’s irrational waiting for the father to come back/their denial that he’d been killed resonated more than I remembered. Of course, on both the way in and the way out, festivalgoers crowded the 3rd, 4th, and 5th floor windows of the Battery Park mulitplex, which offered full frontal views of the World Trade Center site across the street.

For those who think weblogging

For those who think weblogging is now too mainstream, there are alternative outlets for creative expression. Some, like Amazon reviews (of Ping, for instance, or the been-around-the-web-and-back Family Circus) are persistent. Others, like ebay auctions, are perishable. Follow the money, of course. Since I’m more interested in clearing out space in our apartment, recouping the cost of the film, or just making a quick buck, I’ve mostly opted for the perishable.

Here is a sampling of my ebay auctions. Read them for their scintillating entertainment value; of course, bid only if you’re really interested. Believe me, some of the old ones were HI-larious:

  • The Visionaire Bible, a limited edition art/design/fashion magazine/objet. Very big in the 90’s
  • A rare Kozmo.com messenger bag prototype/sewing sample. Don’t worry, I bought the only two known to exist. I’m keeping the other one.
  • A limited edition album from Matthew Barney’s last movie, Cremaster 2. I have a couple of these, too. I’m much less into hoarding than I was in 2000-2001.
  • A USB PCMCIA adapter, purchased because I didn’t notice my laptop already had a USB port.
  • It’s hardly ever a pleasure

    It’s hardly ever a pleasure to read Orwell, or Christopher Hitchens, for that matter, but after you do, you’re annoyed at how worthwhile you find it. (Unless, of course, you’re a huge Henry Kissinger fan. Or Henry Kissinger.) To wit, Hitchens’ writing on Orwell in the LA Weekly. Having just barely finished cleaning up the piles and bills and invites and life that accumulated during the editing of Souvenir, this excerpt from Orwell’s “Confessions of a Book Reviewer,” pulled me right in (just find and replace “cigarettes::red vines” and “tea::diet coke”):

    In a cold but stuffy bed-sitting room littered with cigarette ends and half-empty cups of tea, a man in a moth-eaten dressing gown sits at a rickety table, trying to find room for his typewriter among the piles of dusty papers that surround it. He cannot throw the papers away because the wastepaper basket is already overflowing, and besides, somewhere among the unanswered letters and unpaid bills it is possible that there is a cheque for two guineas which he is nearly certain he forgot to pay into the bank. There are also letters with addresses which ought to be entered into his address book. He has lost his address book, and the thought of looking for it, or indeed of looking for anything, afflicts him with acute suicidal impulses.

    (Oh, and find and replace “acute suicidal impulses::self-doubt and recurrent calculations of the income I’m forgoing by not working for The Man.)

    Brought home a couple of

    Brought home a couple of video works to screen/consider by the artist Gabriel Orozco, and they’re amazing. It’s been about five minutes, and already I’m taken. The artist made five videos as part of Recordings and Drawings, a 1997 show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. They are 40-60 minute streams of things Orozco sees through his video camera on the streets of New York and Amsterdam. The title for each video is comprised of the first and last images on the video. [I’m watching From Flat Tyre To Airplane right now. From Dog Shit to Irma Vep is next.] Here is an excellent discussion of Orozco’s use of video and the genesis of this project. The museum finally got around to publishing a book based on the work.

    They’re quite rough, raw, really, edited solely in the camera. As such, though, they get pretty close to the “eye of the artist,” especially in the case of Orozco, who makes a specialty of working with the most mundane, unprecious materials possible (his last show at Marian Goodman Gallery included works made of dryer lint, plastic bags, and rubber balls with dried palm fronds). I’m not sure which way it works: 1) either Orozco points out the art/beauty we overlook everyday in objects and situations around us, in which case he’s extremely self-effacing and magnanimous, or 2) through his art made out of these commonplace objects and concepts (reflections, circles/spheres, leaves, etc.) he takes over the world, or at least our vision/viewing of it (now everything looks like an Orozco!), in which case he’s a megalomaniac. Do those options have to be mutually exclusive? I mean, I plan on stil being nice to people when I take over the world…

    So I finally got at

    So I finally got at least one production still off the Mac and onto the web. Here is the first of about 20 or so images from Souvenir November 2001, the one which accompanys all the press kits and festival applications (so far).

    It’s a scene of the New Yorker and the caretaker of Lochnagar Crater, a site that the film’s protagonist stumbles across while searching for the Thiepval Memorial. (None of this makes the remotest sense to you? Welcome to my weblog. Check out the background links, script, and storyboard at the top of the lefthand column.) In this scene, the caretaker and his colleague explain the crater’s origin and history. Read about the crater at the Friends of Lochnagar site. And read an account of the 1998 discovery of Private George Nugent’s remains at the crater, an incident the caretaker discusses in the movie.