Titius Has A Posse: BLDGBLOG Interviews Walter Murch

Holy smokes, I’m in like. Geoff sat down with editor/polymath Walter Murch for BLDGBLOG to discuss, of all things, the music of spheres. At least obliquely. I’d say they were Renaissance men, but as their discussion shows, the Renaissance was only just a rediscovery. They’re more like Ptolemaic Men. Here’s a very interesting aside on the possibilities of innate cinematic structure that isn’t even in the top quartile on the interview’s interestingness scale:

BLDGBLOG: When you’re actually editing a film, do you ever become aware of this kind of underlying structure, or architecture, amongst the scenes?
Murch: There are little hints of underlying cinematic structures now and then. For instance: to make a convincing action sequence requires, on average, fourteen different camera angles a minute. I don’t mean fourteen cuts – you can have many more than fourteen cuts per minute – but fourteen new views. Let’s say there is a one-minute action scene with thirty cuts, so that the average length of each is two seconds – but, of those thirty cuts, sixteen of them will be repeats of a previous camera angle.
Now what you have to keep in mind is that the perceiving brain reacts differently to completely new visual information than it does to something it has seen before. In the second case, there is already a familiar template into which the information can be placed, so it can be taken in faster and more readily.
So with fourteen “untemplated” angles a minute, a well-shot action sequence will feel thrilling and yet still comprehensible: just on the edge of chaos, which is how action feels if you are in the middle of it. If it’s less than fourteen, the audience will feel like something is lacking, and they’ll disengage; if it’s more than fourteen, so much new information is being thrown at the audience that they’ll also disengage, though for different reasons.
At the other end of the spectrum, dialogue scenes seem to need an average of four new camera angles a minute. Less than that, and the scene will seem flat and perfunctory; more than that, and it will be hard for the audience to concentrate on the performances and the meaning of the dialogue: the visual style will get in the way of the verbal content and the subtleties of the actors’ performances.
This rule of “four to fourteen” seems to hold across all kinds of films and different styles and periods of filmmaking.

The Heliocentric Pantheon: BLDGBLOG Interview with Walter Murch [bldgblog]

It’s Hard Out There For A Cremaster

cremaster_1_blimps.jpg

And by ‘out there,’ I mean in North Korea. And by ‘a Cremaster,’ I mean Cremaster 1, Barney’s foray into Busby Berkley stadium spectacle.

arirang_fest_ev4eva.jpg

NK’s Arirang Festival has choreographed logistics to make even Barbara Gladstone blush [well, maybe]: 100,000 performers training for a year…actually, I bet they’re pretty cheap.
With stuff like this going on in the world, once-quixotically grand projects like Cremaster seem almost quaint. It’s like how almost any earth art you name pales to the inadvertent aesthetic alterations of the US Army’s Dugway Proving Ground.
The interesting/odd thing is how undercovered the Arirang Festival appears to be, especially given the Great Leader’s supposed fascination with film. The event remains a totalitarian spectacle intended to be experienced live.
There are only a few clips on YouTube [some are at everyoneforever, where this great photo came from as well]. Add live event producer/director and publicist Kim Jong Il’s “to kidnap” list, I guess.

Antonioni’s Chung Kuo

So I’m researching camera angles for an article I’m writing, and so I break out the trusty Susan Sontag, On Photography, and I finally get to the last essay/chapter, which I guess I’ve never read.
It’s the one where she talks about Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo – Cina, his 1972 documentary gift from Italy to the PRC–which promptly got caught up in China’s internal party battle between Mao’s wife and Zhou Enlai, and was massively denounced as a vicious pack of anti-China propaganda. [The Party had approved and supervised/surveilled the 8-week shooting, and Antonioni deployed secret cameras at various points to shoot un-preapproved crowd shots.]
As evidence, the Communist-controlled news media published an analysis/critique of Antonioni’s editing techniques, his subjects–and his camera placement:

And he was accused of denigrating the right subjects by his way of photographing them: by using “dim and dreary colors” and hiding people in “dark shadows”; by treating the same subject with a variety of shots — “there are sometimes long-shots, sometimes close-ups, sometimes from the front, and sometimes from behind” — that is, for not showing things from the point of view of a single, ideally placed observer; by using high and low angles — “The camera was intentionally turned on this magnificent modern bridge from very bad angles in order to make it appear crooked and tottering”; and by not taking enough full shots — “He racked his brain to get such close-ups in an attempt to distort the people’s image and uglify their spiritual outlook.”

Now I’m fascinated. The film–and subsequently, all Antonioni’s work–was banned in China, and was only shown for the first time in 2004. It caused a diplomatic scene at the Venice Film Festival in 1974 when it was set to be screened at La Fenice.
I’m trying to download a torrent of it right now, but otherwise, it’s so hard to find, you might as well be in China. The only thing on the YouTube, appropriately enough, is a five-min segment of comrades lining up to have their photos taken in Tianenmen Square.

ESWN has excerpts of Umberto Eco and Sontag discussing the film’s Chinese reaction [via archive.org, found via supernaut]
Google trans. of clip’s narration/subtitles [fuluzhenxiang]

The Million Dude March

I got on the subway last Sunday just as the Imax screening of 300 had let out, and the 1/9 platform was packed with amped up clumps of guys. Just the night before we’d joked at dinner about A.O. Scott’s review [“as violent as Apocalypto and twice as stupid”] that, even if it didn’t turn out to be Battlefield Earth, we should still go see 300 because it sounded like it’s a landmark of cinema, a touchstone for something, anyway.
But the excitement/incitement of this trainful of stoked dudes–they didn’t all seem like the out & proud, rightist sci-fi nerds to which Neal Stephenson attributes the film’s box office success in the NYT yesterday–made me realize Scott, at least, has a blind spot to the critical reference points of wildly popular genres such as video games and graphic novels. I also worried about my own quick dismissiveness of something that was clearly resonating with a lot of people.
By the time I read the reaction of artist/friend John Powers, however, at Art Threat, I was convinced a lot more attention needs to be paid and serious thinking needs to be done about gloriously violent media–films in particular, but TV and games, too–that stokes the flames of “total war”:

300 is following up on the success of Sin City. Both films are adaptations of comic books by Frank Miller, who also is credited as a producer for both films. The films share an aesthetic of digitally abstracted violence, real flesh is turned into the consistency of cartoon ink: it gives way like warm butter, without resistance and without regret or consequence. These are worlds of deep black and white. Sin City pioneered this aesthetic at the service of noir nihilism. With 300 this stylized violence is harnessed to the cause of glorifying total war. 300 is a pornographic vision of power and perfection and has only contempt for the disfigured and unfamiliar. It plays on the contemporary fear that we are facing a clash of civilizations, and stokes that fear with racist imagery. By calling up old Aryan dreams of a classical world peopled by blond haired blue eyed individuals, and threatening that world with an undifferentiated dark-skinned horde, the film panders to the ugliest aspect of America. Race separates good from evil in this film, this is part of the way it promotes total war. 300 would have us believe that no quarter can be given to our enemies because they are sub-human and hideous.

300: Racist Propaganda with Septic Timing [artthreat.net]

The Mystery Of The Missing Volvo Meta-Documentary

In 2004, Volvo released The Mystery of Dalaro [note: there’s supposed to be an umlaut over the o], a very serious-sounding 8-minute documentary about a small town in Sweden where 32 people suddenly bought the same Volvo on the same day. It was supposedly directed by one Carlos Soto.
It was, in fact, directed by Spike Jonze, who also put together “Soto’s” own site where he questioned the facts of the “documentary” and wondered if he hadn’t, in fact, been duped into making an ad.
The original Mystery is on YouTube, like everything else these days. Everything but the fake Soto rebuttals, unfortunately. For people like me who weren’t giving a damn about Volvos in Europe in 2004, this project exists now only as a fragmented stunt, like the chocolate-syrup-coated ephemera after a piece of performance art.
Though they should be embarassed by its lameness, I’m sure the people at Ford Media thought their own slightly ambiguous Dalaro press release was a real hoot.
Uh, both/neither. It’s advertising: The Mystery of Dalarö: Fact or Fiction? [media.ford.com]

A New Life Awaits You In The Off-World Colonies

Right before the movie came out, I remember seeing a puff piece about how they used a dialogue consultant to figure out the slang of the future in Judge Dredd Demolition Man [thanks, Jason, Sandra Bullock’s other biggest fan]. Also, they had Sylvester Stallone climbing out of the solid Styrofoam interior of his car after a crash. It felt like they were trying too hard and on the absolute wrong things. [Never did see that movie, wonder how it turned out?]
Anyway, the opposite seems true in these two cases. This is the kind of stuff you like to see after the movie’s out–or discover via freezeframe for yourself.
Foreign Office has a reel of their ambient video, commercials, and graphic/info set dressings for Cuaron’s Children of Men. [foreignoffice.com via waxy]
Armin has a collection of graphic design, logos, and signage from Mike Judge’s Idocracy which is pretty awesome. Fox threw Idiocracy in the dumpster soon after it was born. If anyone figures out the way to buy it that gives them the absolute least amount of money possible, please let me know. [underconsideration via kottke]

It’s Like Dogme For Fair Use

Sweet. Lessig announced an insurance/legal services partnership for documentary filmmakers whose films are certified as meeting American University’s Fair Use For Filmmakers Best Practices Standards.
Changing documentary clearance practices was huge enough, and already paved the way for PBS to air Byron Hurt’s Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes and for IFC to co-produce and distribute Kirby Dick’s clip-heavy This Film Is Not Yet Rated, to quote just two of CSM-AU’s examples.
But now, if your film certifies–paging Harmony Korrine!–Stanford’s Fair Use Project, which has as its mission the market-based reclaiming of fair use rights that have been boilerplated away by risk-averse distributors, will provide pro bono legal support in the event someone makes a copyright infringement claim against it.
Except, you know, when they won’t: “If we can’t provide pro bono services, then Michael Donaldson’s firm will provide referrals to a number of media lawyers who will provide representation at a reduced rate.”
So if you’re going to get sued, perhaps as part of your promotion plan for the film, and you want to get sued for free, try getting sued in a sexy and strategic enough Fair Use Test Case way that kicks SFUP’s own ball down the field as well. Good luck with that.
Major News: Fair Use and Film [lessig via bb]
Insurer accepts fair use claims! [centerforsocialmedia.org]
Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use [csm, nov 05]

Weird: Claude Lelouch – Snow Patrol Mash-up

It’s fascinating to inadvertently track the transformation of Claude Lelouch’s 1976 tracking shot tour de Paris and/or force C’etait un Rendez Vous go from mythical underground film to rediscovered classic to Google-mapped puzzle to demythologized YouTube entertainment–and now to mainstream mash-up material.
Snow Patrol, aka the Scottish Coldplay, has licensed Lelouch’s film and used it–portions of it, anyway, as the video for their single, “Open Your Eyes.” My knee-jerk reaction was, “well, that’s a lazy-ass way to make a music video,” but I have to say, it generally works, so I guess I’m cool with it. Mostly because I like to think that hundreds of people have already done the same thing themselves and swapped out Lelouch’s phony engine roar for their favorite roadtrip music anyway.
But to Snow Patrol’s credit, they appear to have actually reworked–or, as the credits put it, “remastered”–the original to their own artistic ends. Sure, they chop four minutes off and edit out the shoot-the-Louvre segment, but it seems like they also pumped up the contrast as well. I thought they even added some CG-flashes of flame toward the end, but then I realized they were the fleeing pigeons, picked out in headlamps of Lelouch’s Ferrari Mercedes 450 SEL 6.9.
One thing that hasn’t changed, though, is the easy, factcheck-free laziness surrounding Rendez Vous‘ myths. In this age of Google, it takes a real commitment to keep ahold of romantic-but-made-up details; Very Short List can take comfort in knowing they’re part of a long tradition of not Googling the little stuff.
You can watch Snow Patrol’s “Open Your Eyes” on the YouTube. [via vsl, thanks michael!]

Hugh Harman’s Peace On Earth (1939)

In retrospect, 1939 was a rough year to be a diehard pacifist. But that’s when Hugh Harman’s Peace On Earth anti-war cartoon was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Mahatma Gandhi was nominated that year, too, but ’39 was the beginning of five-year stretch when the award was not given.
The timing makes me think of some of the giant WWI memorials in France which were conceived at the height of unalloyed pacificism. The Australian National Memorial in Villers-Bretonneux, for example, wasn’t finished until 1938, just in time for the French to use it–unsuccessfully–as a position for repelling the German invasion.
Anyway, the cartoon is about the merry little forest creatures of Peaceville, who are picking up the pieces after all the humans have killed themselves off. Enjoy. [via fred]

Super Columbine Massacre NYT!

The constroversy over Peter Baxter’s decision to pull Super Columbine Massacre RPG! from Slamdance’s Guerilla Gamemakers Festival hit the New York Times this weekend, and Baxter has yet another explanation for his actions.
This time, it’s not complaints by a sponsor, hypothetical complaints by a sponsor, or even his own personal distaste for the game. It was, as he explains to Heather Chaplin,

because of outraged phone calls and e-mail messages he’d been receiving from Utah residents and family members associated with the Columbine shooting. He was also acting on the advice of lawyers who warned him of the threat of civil suits if he showed the game.

Uh-huh.
Chaplin writes of SCMRPG!’s “champions” and “detractors,” which I think misses a major point. In the glare of attention and the fallout surrounding the game, and certainly around the decision to pull it. It’s pure media Heisenberg: as events unfolded and garnered more attention, everyone–Baxter, Danny Ledonne, the game’s creator, other designers who pulled their games in protest, and observer/critics–adjusted their own positions and justifications for their moral stances in light of what new had transpired.
Greg Costikyan posted a reader’s refutation of his legitimating defense/review of the game which is at once perceptive [and not just for using the twee critspeak, “games qua anything”] and entirely beside the point. Whatever Ledonne’s ex post facto interpretations of his game, the argument goes, his earliest discussions of it were not ironic metacommentary; they were the rantings of a dumbass who was wallowing in the Columbine killers’ actions. The game isn’t a self-consciously retro exploration of society, but an amateurish hack by a guy who didn’t know how to change the default settings on his RPG gamemaking software.
Conclusion: SCMRPG! sucks as a game and should never have been juried into the competition in the first place. Which sounds true, but irrelevant to this situation.
Sundance’s jury let in an exploitative, sensationalistic, controversy-seeking POS starring Dakota Fanning this year, but you didn’t see Redford pulling rank and yanking the film. It just got the critical drubbing it deserved and will presumably slip into oblivion as it should.
Instead, the fact that a POS like SCMRPG! got into the competition at all should spur debate over the critical standards for judging games, which seem poorly thought through at best. Get a smarter jury, one which isn’t just interested in flamethrowing qua flamethrowing by introducing a crap game to the competition.
But the combination of as-yet unformed critical consensus about what makes a “good” game or a game “good,” combined with Baxter/Slamdance’s knuckleheaded, ass-covering conservatism only strengthens the case that games need a new, different venue of their own. Whether it’s a festival, a competition, whatever, is up to the gameworld to decide.
As for SCMRPG!, I’m still inclined to cut Ladonne some slack. If Trey Parker and Matt Stone had turned tail after their musical Cannibal! was rejected from Sundance, there may never have been a South Park. And there may never have been a Slamdance, for that matter.
Artists are not always clear or conscious of what goes into their work, and they’re certainly not in control of the response it engenders when it gets into the world. Whatever the merit (or lack thereof) in SCMRPG!, it still resonates because of its uncanny similarity to a scene in Gus Van Sant’s Elephant. The two killers-to-be are loafing around a basement bedroom. One plays the piano [fur Elise] and one plays an RPG on a laptop. It was an effortless kill’em game set in an empty desert.
The targets were dressed like the characters from Van Sant’s Gerry. After expressing surprise that anyone had noticed, the producer of Elephant, Dany Wolf, told me that they had to create their own game [using the Doom engine], because they couldn’t find a company who’d allow their video game to be used in the film.
Video Game Tests The Limits. The Limits Win. [nyt]

On Unfilmable Novels

As someone whose desktop contains several drafts of an adaptation of a straightforwardly narrative but slightly magically naturalist historical novel, I’ve watched the discussion of Screenhead’s list of unfilmable novels with vested interest.
It took over forty comments for my personal favorite Unfilmable Novel to come up, though, which gave me plenty of time to get reflexively critical of the list. What hasn’t really emerged, though, is any real discussion or analysis of what makes a novel unfilmable.
There are nods to textual density and complex narrative structure, but honestly, if “unfilmable” really just means “no obvious three-act structure” then we’re really just talking about “Unfilmable by Syd Field alumni,” and guess what? Not interesting.
Whether it’s Pulp Fiction, Requiem for a Dream, Memento, or Koyanisqaatsi, a film can reject quite a few filmic storytelling conventions and be the better for it. So Eoin’s concern about Beckett, “How on earth could anyone adapt a novel that fails to have a character?” doesn’t bother me as much as “How on earth could anyone adapt a novel under the suffocating restrictions of the Beckett estate?”
The problem of filming long and episodic novels like Don Quixote is largely artificial, like trying to turn a novel into a comprehensive sculpture. The Sopranos, The Wire, even Lord of The Rings should show there’s no need to whittle a thousand great pages into a single, 120-page script.
My own favorite novel I can’t figure out how to film is Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which turns out to be structurally similar to my second favorite unfilmable novel, DFW’s Infinite Jest. Both are footnoted, hypertextual extravaganzas which require juggling thumbs and threads as you jump back and forth from “story” to “supporting material,” even as they call such distinctions into question.
As it turns out, Soderbergh has talked about his interest in Pale Fire, too. In 1996, Stan Schwartz suggested Nabokov as an interest/inspiration:

:Oh hell, yeah! Pale Fire. Yeah, he’s great. There’s a huge deconstructive element in his work. The acknowledgment that you’re reading a book. And there’s a lot of that in Schizopolis. The awareness that you’re watching a movie, and the film’s awareness that you’re aware that you’re watching a movie.

[He continues talking about the making of Schizopolis and adapting Spaulding Gray’s monologue, Gray’s Anatomy, too; it’s an interesting read.]
The subjectivity inherent in the list is amplified by attaching directors’ names to these dream projects, “if anyone can do it, Tarantino/Lynch/Soderbergh/Aronofsky can”-style. There’s nothing inherently unfilmable in these titles; it’s just that we can’t imagine how to do it. The problem isn’t the novels’; it’s ours.
But maybe there IS something else, a structural problem. How many studio execs or producers have actually read Joyce or Proust or Nabokov–or Cervantes? When I chose the name of my production company from Don Quixote, one project on my initial slate was shooting an adaptation of the novel without having read it. That became citing Don Quixote as an inspiration/reference in press material, knowing full well that almost no one would ever question or refute the claim. People “know” many of these novels as Great and Difficult, but they’ve rarely actually read them. [Hell, I still haven’t read Ulysses or finished Infinite Jest, for that matter.]
The amount of imaginationpower being thrown against possible film adaptations is thus exponentially smaller than we imagine. Meanwhile, in addition to the mindset of executives, the film industry’s production and funding infrastructure is designed not to make challenging, experimental, or unconventional films. The result is not exactly fertile soil for these projects to develop.
Terry Gilliam’s Depp-meets-Don Quixote project didn’t fail because Cervantes is unfilmable; in fact, the unbaked, chaotic ridiculousness of Gilliam’s film/script/vision itself was the least of the reasons that production imploded.

Agnes Martin Documentary at Film Forum

There are very few artists I’d like to see a documentary about. For one thing, the narrative arc of a movie is usually ill-suited to either an artist’s story/ideas or to the experience of the work itself. And no one can hold still, for fear, I guess, of boring the viewer, so there are invariably lots of slow pans, zooms in and out, dolly shots through empty galleries [if the budget’s high enough to lay track, though I’ve seen a cameraman improvise a dolly by sitting in a mail cart.]
And their ostensible populism usually results in a grating boosterism of PBS or the Hagiographic School, whereby the case must be made for the Artist As Genius. [Damn populist medium again, but the October-y intellectual monkey tricks of art critical dialogue never seem to find their way into documentaries. It’s as if everyone figures they need to dumb it down, or maybe it’s just impossible to edit paragraph-long sentences into anything remotely watchable.]
Which is all a long way around to saying that Agnes Martin is one artist I would love to see working and hear talking, and not just because I miss her in some irrational, oddly personal way. [I never met her.] I have some old lecture notes from a talk she gave at ICA or someplace, and they are windswept-free of pretense and the cruft of art criticism and history.
From the review of Mary Lance’s documentary, “Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World,” which she shot over four years, starting in 1998, Martin sounds like a refreshing, invigorating, and lucid counterpoint to the careerist whirl of the art world today. [And on top of that she sold tons of work.]
Anyway, Lance’s film opened yesterday at Film Forum, and it’s paired with a documentary about Kiki Smith. Lance will conduct a Q&A after the 8pm screening Friday [tomorrow].
Previously: Im Memoriam: Agnes Martin

A Day In The Office In The Gallery

For the 2006 Turner Prize exhibition, artist Phil Collins had Tate Britain set him up with an office in the gallery, where he and two hired researchers worked every day on Phil’s next project: “finding people who feel their lives have been ruined by appearing in reality television shows.”
Collins used the media hype around the Turner competition itself to garner the attention of his intended subject/collaborators. And according to the firsthand account of Lena Corner, one of the researchers, the strategy succeeded brilliantly.
She wrote about her experience of being on display while trying to actually get work done for The Independent last fall. It’s an uncanny parallel to the spectacle and exhibitionism Collins & Co. were researching, though fortunately for Corner she seems to have suffered no lingering effects.

Gillian, the cleaning supervisor, pops in. Apparently the cleaners have been too scared to empty our bin in case it’s an artwork. In 2004 German-born artist Gustav Metzger created a piece of “auto-destructive art” for the Tate. One element was a bag containing rubbish that he had collected from within the gallery, but a cleaner mistook it for a bag of rubbish and threw it out. Metzger declared the piece to be ruined. No wonder the cleaners are a little nervous.

Turner Prize: Inside one of the installations [independent.co.uk via cerealart’s blog]

The DaVinci Code Code

With six trans-oceanic flights last month, I ended up seeing The DaVinci Code with the sound off at least two dozen times. The only thing that surprises me about this Reuters story is that it’s taken this long for other craven museums to get into the movie tie-in game:

In the next two years [the Louvre and the Musee d’Orsay] will between them underwrite screenplays by seven critically acclaimed international filmmakers for films to be shot — at least partly — inside their walls.

The Louvre is co-financing and co-producing a film by Taiwanese director Tsai Ming Liang, which will be shot entirely onsite.
Meanwhile, to comemmorate its 20th anniversary, d’Orsay is “working with” [?] director/producer Francois Margolin’s company Margo Films to make four $3mm films starring Juliet Binoche [?], and directed by Olivier Assayas, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Raoul Ruiz, and Jim Jarmusch.

“Though it’s probably not conscious, the ripple effects from presenting an image beyond museum walls is about branding — the art collections and the museum — to potential visitors from around the world.”

says Margolin, just before I smack him on the forehead.
Museums getting key parts in films [thr.com]