View from the window at Le Gras, 1826, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce
image: Ransom Center, UT Austin
Or specifically, the Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin:
1) to see the world’s first photograph, a view out his window taken by a Frenchman, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, in 1826. Jim Lewis writes about it on Slate.
2) to read the unpublished manuscript of Minstral Island, a futuristic musical by Thomas Pynchon and Kirkpatrick Sale, which they recently acquired. [Fill out your research application before you go. Oh, and get Pynchon’s written permission if you want to make a copy. I’m sure he’s listed.]
Just One. Last. Shot
This morning, I ran off to shoot one more pre-sunrise shot of the mountains and highway for S(J03), a cold, dark 2.5 hour round trip from SLC.
With the sweet Powerbook that Santa brought me, I’ll get some stills up this weekend or next week, depending on the editing schedule. Stay tuned for a rush course in short filmmaking!
S(J03) Logging, Story Structure Notes, and J-Lo
What a way to spend Boxing Day. I logged two of the three hours of footage we shot Monday for S(J03), which took most of the afternoon. Now that I know what we have to edit, the question is, how can I best tell the story in the script? Technical issues and changes on the ground complicate things a bit.
Technical issues: Unstable monitor settings which we didn’t solve until about 11AM means that some really good shots from the morning are just too dark to use. Others are too good not to use, even if they are a little dark. The solution: work the lighting into the story, using it to mark the passage of time. As it works out, this jibes well with the daily routine in the cleaners, which is staggered half-a-day from the dry cleaning process. (i.e., they do the first steps (cleaning and pressing) in the afternoon/evening and the last two steps (bagging and sorting for pickup) the next morning.) The light/shadow/darkness in our footage maps onto the process well.
Changes on the ground: In the script, the main character spends a day working at the dry cleaners. Rather than negotiate and explain this to Joe, the cleaners owner, over the phone, I just asked if we could shoot without disrupting their routine. Joe was nervous because Monday is their busiest day. Looking at the footage, an arc emerged: we started exploring the facility, then observing the people, then asking questions. After building up a degree of familiarity and trust, the man quietly and naturally offered to help. This evolution from observer to participant, and the growing trust it entails, was more satisfying than what I’d originally intended, so it became an organizing principle for the film.
Finally, the J-Lo Factor. Watching the footage, there are so many wonderful details and vignettes, it feels like I’d have to make an hour-long documentary to include them all. Not gonna do it. With the basic structural principles in place (light>>dark, start>>finish rather than just day>>night, reticent observer>>trusted participant) a rigid narrative, sequential arc seems less imperative. The film is more reflection than narrative, we decided, especially in the dry cleaners. Pushing this forward, we came up with the idea of intercutting between two timestreams: ironing and driving, getting ready and going.
Steven Soderbergh, in what I still feel is one of the sweetest examples of this technique, just brings it home in the seduction scene in Out of Sight. I’ve mentioned this before. If my repetition bores you, by all means, clue me into other great scenes.
This all relates to notes I made on the table today at lunch. Check out a transcript here.
Just Like The Ones I Used To Know
Mom’s house, those chocolate cookies with powdered sugar on them, embarassing family pictures, elaborate meals. For several fleeting moments, you’re ten years old again. You actually feel it. Why? It seems like every other year, but those visceral feelings of actually being back in time… What could be different?
Then, as you surf the news at Google [sure didn’t have that when I was a kid!], and as you read the Times and the Guardian [that, either.], it breaks on you like a dawn. Something extra this year. It’s a clock, alright, but not as in “clock, turning back the,” more like “clock, doomsday.”
What really makes you feel like you’re ten again is the Doomsday Clock, the one your uptight Viet Nam vet civics teacher told you was inching perilously close to midnight. [Uptight? He’d blink hard a few times before answering a question, trying to hold it all together.] Go figure. Hadn’t thought of that for a while.
Thank you, President Bush. And thank your friends. For a Christmas just like the ones I used to know.
S(J03) Shooting, Day 1/1
Synopsis: A man travels to Springville, Utah to hang out in a dry cleaners owned by Joe, a Korean immigrant.
Cast & Crew: I directed. Artist/photographer Patrick Barth starred as cinematographer. Producer/assistant camera/astrophysicist Jean Cottam did everything else. Joe (presumably) makes his onscreen debut as himself. Patrick, a longtime friend, is working on his own film-based project for the Spring, and was interested in getting a feel for the Sony VX camera and the logistics of shooting; when we found out that we would all be in Utah for the holidays, I rushed together this one-day shoot.
Locations: The simple script calls for just three locations: a hotel room, the man’s car, and the cleaners. The Provo Travelodge served us well; we didn’t spend nearly enough time in the richly appointed lobby (see left). Faced with such breathtaking mountain views, the Travelodge decided not to compete; their room decor is very pared down, which fit the aesthetic needs of the story. I’d known about the cleaners in Springville; you might say I’d location scouted it before.
Equipment: For this rather impromptu shoot, I kept equipment at a minimum. Probably too minimum, but any more’d mean more crew, more time, next thing you know there’re unions involved, Della Reese wants a cameo, you get the idea.
Actually, I’d planned to mooch equipment from a friend in SLC, but schedules didn’t match up, so at the last minute, I brought my old Sony VX-1000 and package from New York. It worked great, except when it didn’t work. Overdue for its factory service, we had inexplicable outages, which we at first thought was the monitor (battery or cable). As they say in Provo, oh my heck, this thing is a piece of shizz.
Lighting, with a 2-live crew , we had to go with natural light; from my intense study of Soderbergh DVD commentaries (see Traffic School), I learned about replacing light bulbs. (Note to Travelodge: If you’re wondering why room 217 uses 10x as much electricity as the others, check the bulbs.) What we didn’t figure out until it was too late is to use natural wavelength or tungsten bulbs. As a workaround, I rewrote the script so that the golden hues of the small hotel room pay homage to Soderbergh’s Mexico scenes. Option 2: Heck, we’ll fix it in post.
Sound, we were screwed. I didn’t get DAT/MD and a mic before coming out, so we ended up shooting all camera mic. This should be ok, since there’s hardly any dialogue in the 5-min. film. The solution here: fix it in post. We took ample room tone in each location, and then did some scenes purely for sound, as if the camera were just a mic. The idea is to clean up these tracks as much as possible and construct the sound once we get the rough cut.
I’ve got some last minute Christmas shopping to do, so check back for some amusing anecdotes.
Thanks For Coming. Nice To Meet You. What Are You Drinking?
Greg.org got quoted in The Juice, MSNBC entertainment polymath Jan Herman’s weblog, for my post about the Peter Eisenman & Co’s (aka the Gang of New York) “stealth deconstructivist memorial” proposal for the WTC site. Why “stealth”? Because what they pitched as the most humble building turns out to be the most massive of all monuments. So, why stealth?
Anyway, I have changed the title of my next movie to celebrate The Juice: henceforth, it will be called Souvenir (Jan 2003).
New Short Film: Souvenir (January 2003) Location Shooting
I haven’t posted much about it at all, but I wrote a new short script, S(J03), which I’m going to do a rough shoot of Monday in Springville, Utah. If it goes well, we’ll come back and shoot it in film during Sundance. It’s about a guy who takes quiet pleasure in ironing. I imagine it’ll be about 5 minutes long, and we’ll try to get a rough cut ready to show the folks at Lincoln Center’s New Directors/New Films by Jan. 8. Another self-imposed, ridiculously short deadline, which we have no reason to believe we’ll meet.
Here is the location schedule for the one-day shoot. Check back for a blow-by-blow account.
Souvenir (November 2001) Screening Recap
I’m quite behind, obviously. Thursday went very well, as I wrote earlier. Souvenir (November 2001) screened last in a program of four short films which, in the words of Festival Director (and MoMA curator) Sally Berger, were “different from all the Sept. 11-related things we’ve been saturated with…These ‘makers use a more essayistic, and in one case [mine, -ed.], narrative form to explore issues and ideas.” The other three films were:
Before the screening, I met David and Etienne in the theater, when we were caught off guard by the opening music from Souvenir; the projectionist was checking the levels. Family showed up, a wave of people I didn’t know, then a couple of familiar faces. The whole thing was more nervewracking than I’d imagined. Sally Berger got up to introduce the films, then we were off.
I was very interested to see the other three films, which were very different from each other and very good in their own ways. Inevitably, I was caught up, trying to anticipate what kind of context the program was creating for my film. (The only line I remember from Beaches: “But enough about me, let’s talk about you. What do you think of me?”) The various settings, pacing, tone and styles worked well, though, and people seemed to take Souvenir in quite readily.
Watching it on the big (did I say big, I meant HUGE) screen was intoxicating; repeatedly, self-consciousness would build (“oh no, this shot’ll be too long!”), and then a gorgeous image or a nice cut would come. People reacted to lines I worried were too obscure. A couple of shots were kind of dark, but if you look back to the location notes, lighting was one of our major challenges then, too.
Then, it was over. Lights came on, the woman in front of us bolted, I knew no one’d stay for the Q&A, and they did. Norman and Etienne both took questions, Sally talked about putting the program together, and then people asked about Souvenir, how memorials change over time, what French people thought, what should happen on the WTC site, about repeated references to emptiness and voids in the film (something I hadn’t really considered), and then it was over. People came up, we got shooed to the lobby, we talked and talked, there were hangers on, it was very, very cool. Just like you’d see in a movie. theater.
So Now I Know
Coatcheck
So you’re at the Annie Liebovitz party, where even the Christmas trees are tall and skinny, and there’s no coatcheck. The safest place to leave your things: next to the bag containing $1,000 worth of marijuana, watched nervously by its owner.
Finally, the voices in my head have a name, and that name is Gawker.
Wellwishers Multiplying Like Rabbits
Thanks to all y’all (as we’d say in NC, at least when our parents weren’t around) who’ve sent your kind wishes and congratulations re Souvenir. Since 1) You mailed from work, 2) you mailed from outside New York, and 3) there were far more of you than bodies in the theater, I conclude most of you weren’t actually at MoMA yesterday. So thanks for the vote of confidence, too, I guess.
So far, the winner of the farthest-away-wellwisher goes to Aussie Matthew Clayfield, who writes about his prodigious film production activities on his weblog, Esoteric Rabbit Films. According to his site, he has yet to graduate to wearing pants. He’s 16.
Souvenir Screening: (Too Much) Like A Dream (Team)
I’m beat, but I have to mention one experience from the premiere that caught me totally offguard. My film, Souvenir was shown with three other short films, including Etienne Sauret and David Carrara’s haunting WTC: The First 24 Hours. Sauret captured the empty shock and silence of Ground Zero, images of a time and place otherwise closed to the media, like these fragments of the Towers’ trademark steel columns.
Still, WTC: The First 24 Hours, dir. by Etienne Sauret. Image: thefirst24hours.com
Then in Souvenir, this MIT webpage briefly flashed across the screen during the Google search. Professor Helene Lipstadt had helped students build the Reflecting Wall, a painted wooden replica of these columns, which went up within three days of the attacks.
MIT’s Reflecting Wall, Sept. 14, 2001 Image: Donna Coveney, MIT
My mind went immediately to the the WTC proposal put forward yesterday by Richard Meier, Charles Gwathmey, Steven Holl, and Peter Eisenman.
Meier, Gwathmey, Holl and Eisenman WTC Proposal image: LMDC
There’s no mention of such a reference at all in either their presentation or their written proposal. Instead, they refer to “a new typology in the tradition of innovative skyscraper design…quiet abstraction…screens of presence and absence…[and] interlaced fingers of protective hands.” So this “Dream Team” never imagined their proposal for rebuilding closely references the wreckage of the Twin Towers? You must be dreaming.
“Partly collapsed” office towers, by Peter Eisenman. NYT caption: “…the buildings would echo the devastation wrought on 9/11 and offer a striking memorial to the fallen towers.”
In September, Eisenman contributed a design for office buildings on West Street (facing Ground Zero) to NY Times critic Herbert Muschamp’ ambitious exercise, “Don’t Rebuild. Reimagine.”. In the Magazine’s Flash presentation, Eisenman describes the buildings:
You get the effect of …a moment of frozen time, where the buildings are collapsing, and what we tried to do was record in the buildings that moment, a moment of impact on the surrounding buildings that would be recorded as part of the memorial.
Even though they avoid mentioning it, the “Dream Team” has proposed to freeze a different moment in time, the first 24 hours.
Post Script: A reader (from Eisenman’s Yale, by the way) pointed out another connection, one that I didn’t make yesterday: the formal similarities to Steven Holl’s just-finished building, a dorm at MIT.
Souvenir (November 2001) World PREMIERED
Three-line synopsis: It went amazingly well; about 60 strangers(!); a couple of media, and interest from one critic; three very interesting companion films in the program; chuckles in the right places; thoughtful questions afterward; and supportive friends, crew, and family. Oh, and Sally Berger, organizer of the Festival called it “wonderful and moving.”
We’re going to dinner now, then I’ll return to earth and give more details.
LIVE@WTC DESIGN PRESS CON. PIX …
LIVE@WTC DESIGN PRESS CON. PIX ETC 2 FOLLOW
WTC Site Designs Revealed While Director Poaches Memorial-Friendly Media
[2018 UPDATE: In 2018 The New York Times reports that five women who worked with Meier, either at his firm or as a contractor, have come forward to say the architect made aggressive and unwanted sexual advances and propositions to them. The report also makes painfully clear that Meier’s behavior was widely known for a long time, and that his colleagues and partners did basically nothing to stop it beyond occasionally warning young employees to not find themselves alone with him. This update has been added to every post on greg.org pertaining to Meier or his work.]
If the 3+ hour multimedia press conference for around 25 brand name architects to present their proposals for the World Trade Center site were Saks, I was the chick selling hand-beaded mittens from a card table on the sidewalk. Actually, as a media event, it was more wholesale than retail; press and LMDC staffers outnumbered Invited Guests about 3:1. So rather than just spam the (presumably interested in memorials) crowd with cards for tomorrow’s screening, I switched to providing background and “context” to the media folks and sharing thoughtful opinions and quotes on the designs. (ex. “They sure don’t build ’em like they used to,” opined Greg Allen, a New York filmmaker whose documentary about a WWI memorial opens today at MoMA…”)
So, how are they? Well, compared to the first round of designs announced in July (which sucked), things are looking up. As one juror told me, the overall high quality of these designs just makes him realize how depressing last summer actually was, and I have to agree; some of the designs are quite impressive, inspiring, even. Here are some action photos from the event; It was a real scrum for a while.
WTC Bathtub wall under construction, 1968. Image: Museum of The City of New York
Daniel Libeskind‘s memorial proposal, titled Memory Foundation, includes the “bathtub” as well as the towers’ footprints. The bathtub–a watertight, concrete, underground structure designed to hold back the Hudson River–should be recognized as a symbol of strength and resilience, says Libeskind. The New Yorker re-published a fascinating 1972 account of the bathtub’s construction by Edith Iglauer.
Foster & Partners, “tallest, cleanest” etc.. Image: LMDC
Lord Foster’s presentation shows why he got the upgrade (from Norman and Sir, for that matter). He was smooth, his images were clear and seductive, and he dropped references to his work so lightly (“The Reichstag is a memorial itself, really…”), that selecting his two towers “which kiss and touch and become one” seemed inevitable.
In an unexpected train wreck of a presentation, the “Dream Team” (Richard Meier’s opening words), sought to shun ego and it’s evil progeny, “architecture.” At least they avoided the architecture. Meier’s unfortunately morose presentation matched the missed opportunities of their proposal.
I say missed, because in the most impressive presentation and proposal of them all, United Architects, another team effort, nailed the incredible potential of ideas the Dream Team had right in front of them. Even though it appeared in other proposals, too, UA made a Sky Memorial a reality by showing that it already exists; Greg Lynn talked of the team members’ early and overwhelming visits to the families’ viewing room, which overlooks Ground Zero. They proposed one memorial 60 stories in the air, atop the first building to be constructed at the perimeter of the site. Gradually, four more towers would join it, forming a “cathedral-like” arc around the memorial in the footprints.
United Architects, view of (1620′) towers from footprint memorial. Image: LMDC
The towers would angle toward each other across the restored street grid, forming a massive, new urban space, 60 stories up and five stories high, contiguous across all five towers. To drive their proposal home, they showed an extremely effective film, which alternated views from within the buildings with repeated shots of people on the street looking up, like they used to do. It was surprisingly impressive. See their flash presentation on their site.
As for me, well, I did a fair job of working the crowd, chatting up anyone I saw with a green sticker on (ie., media) and then handing out quotes, reactions, and the cards for tomorrow’s screening of Souvenir (November 2001). There were some very nice responses, and no one seemed to equate this kooky project with the scattering of amateur memorialists and professional World Trade Center groupies who crowded the periphery of the event. Combined with the encouraging replies from the mailings that went out, tomorrow could turn out alright.
As I Lay Typing…
Scorsese’s Kundun is on, and it occurs to me that this is his most beautiful film. The opening, a sequence of details from a Tibetan sand mandala, is entrancing. Roger Deakins (cinematographer) rocks. Here’s an interview with him and 13 other great DP’s. If you’ve never watched Tibetan monks make a sand mandala, seek it out. There should be a Mandala Aggregator site, like PublicRadioFan, where you can find mandalas in process anywhere in the world. [Is this what Larry King’s column’d be like if he knew XML?]
I stayed up too late last night watching that sycophant on In The Actor’s Studio suck up to Mr. Scorsese (Oh, sorry. Marty.) for two hours. He had to mention their dinner together at Cannes three times. Anyway, I imagine a movie about the Dalai Lama’d be a little weird for a Christmas gift, but Amazon can’t ship it in time anyway.
An embarassingly bad collection of operatic shorts just ended on Sundance, including one by the late Derek Jarman. That, in turn, reminded me of Blue, his last feature. Blind from persistent chemotherapy treatments, Jarman had an unexposed reel of film printed as azure blue (apparently, there are no frames). For eighty minutes, dialogue, sounds, and music wash over you; by about half way through, you’d swear there are distortions, shadows, movement on the monochromatic screen. It’s wonderful (and available on CD). Reading it is nice, but it doesn’t do it justice.