Monthly Archive for October, 2009

From time to time I will do an update of earlier pieces with added thoughts or new information. I will also link to the original essay in case you want to revisit it. Martha Winterhalter, who is administrating this site, is working with our Webmaster, Jon Stout, to create an easier way to access the archieved pieces. The existing “Wordpress” format is not yet our ideal system for easy access to them.

(This coming Monday I will post a two-part piece titled, “Last Man Standing in Toxic Town.” It is the story of a town and its people, a town in the tri-state corner of northeast Oklahoma that once had the world’s largest lead and zinc mine.)

Here is an update of three previous essays:

ONE

This is the link to the Roy Andersson piece.

I did in fact meet Roy Andersson at his MOMA retrospective. It was comprehensive and the prints were excellent, many with projected titles in English. One thing that is certain about New York film audiences—no matter how specialized or arcane the subject or filmmaker, the Titus Theaters at MOMA are always well attended.

Andersson is indeed a quiet and gentle man; he has a devoted group of fellow artists and filmmakers who collaborate on all his films. They work mainly within the parameters of his personal workspace, Studio 24.

There was a new documentary shown as part of the retrospective, Tomorrow’s Another Day, made by his colleagues Pehr Arte and Johan Carlsson. It follows the shooting of Andersson’s recent feature, You, the Living and illustrates in great detail how many of the scenes were filmed.  Most sets are built only out to the edges of a predetermined frame, with a set camera distance, height and lens, often as wide as 16mm. This is necessary as many sets are built in false perspective since the stage space is quite compact. The wide lenses create a sense of great depth and aid in the necessary deep focus. There are no CGI or visual effects employed. Everything is done in camera with foreground elements hanging in front of the lens to extend set heights.

A case in point is the end sequence, the so-called “Armada Bombing.” This first clip shows Andersson talking with an efx artist about the scale model of the city to be bombed. At the beginning of the shot, note the small painted sky backing and the suspended planes that will be dropped by wires into the scene:

Here is the final sequence of the film. The scene of the bombers in formation over the city begins at 1:52. This whole shot is done in real time on the stage. Crew members fly in multiple elements and create the clouds with a smoker:

Here is a picture gallery from You, the Living.

Link to picture gallery

Contrary to what I had thought, Andersson says he uses very few of the sets from his commercials as recycled elements in his films. The shots in his films are just too specific. The detail and intricacy required to create each scene captured in a single setup, harkens back to an earlier handmade cinema era, almost to the magic theater of Mêlies.

Here is an excerpt from an interview Andersson did recently with Leonard Lopate on his eponymous WNYC radio show. Lopate asks him if his commercial work “bites the hand that feeds you.” Andersson, whose English is excellent, doesn’t get the idiom right away.

One 15-minute film that was shown at the retrospective and is now available on YouTube is World of Glory. The opening scene is a vision of a nightmarish future:

www.dailymotion.com/video link

The narrator standing in the foreground and turning to camera several times is a businessman, (Andersson calls these characters “Mr. Nobodys”) whose bleak life becomes ever more unraveled, blackout-to-blackout as the film unreels. The subtitles are in French but the uncompromising severity of the images speaks for itself. Do remember, Andersson says his works are comedies. Beckett, anyone?

I fully understand that Andersson’s aesthetic is not tasty gruel for everyone. But his vision of cinema is, despite all the critics’ comparisons, absolutely unique in a world of cinema that is becoming increasingly cookie-cutter in its stylistic batter.

If you’ve stuck with the links ‘til now, here are two clips from You, the Living that show the more comedic, absurdist side of Andersson, what I called in the earlier essay, the “Keatonesque.”

TWO

Here is the link for the Robert Frank essay on the 50th anniversary of the publication of
The Americans and its celebration with a touring exhibition
that is now at the Metropolitan Museum.

I wrote this previous piece before the exhibition had opened in NYC but later, I did see it several times during its opening week. If you are on the east coast, go. If not, it stays at the Met until Jan. 3, 2010. This is its final stop. It has already been to SFMOMA. It is worth a trip to NYC just to see this historic show.

The gallery layout reveals just how much thought and editing Frank made in structuring the flow of the 83 images in the book. There are four sections (not indicated by captioned or chapter breaks), each one introduced with a photo displaying the American flag. This flow, image to image, can only be fully appreciated by seeing the work hung on a gallery wall. One imagines this is how Frank laid out the photos during his yearlong editing process. Several vitrines contain the marked up contact sheets of each of the images that made up the final selection. A close scrutiny of these sheets reveals Frank’s shooting method. Sometimes, there is close to a full roll of 36 frames exposed to get the chosen image; sometimes, there are only two or three.

Many of the prints are vintage. But some appear to be more recent, esp. the larger ones that come from his dealer, Peter McGill. We are used to thinking of work from the 50s and 60s printed in either 8 x 10 or no more than 11 x 14. Many of the prints here exhibited are much larger and defy your expectations, both in scale and in richness of tone. Much has been written about how casual Frank was with exposures. The contact sheets do testify to that as there is often great variance in exposure from frame to frame, but there is not a single image that looks compromised in the final print.

Here is a slideshow and audio interview with Philip Getter. Frank discusses specific images:

www.nytimes.com/interactive link

And here is Holland Cotter’s NY Times review of the Met exhibition in situ:

www.nytimes.com article link

There is a pocket gallery at the end of the exhibition. On one wall a 3-minute video is projected. Frank made it at his home in Nova Scotia and in his apartment in NYC. It is here that Frank shoots video of a friend using a power drill to make several holes through a stack of prints of The Americans. It is shocking and is a testament to how imprisoned Frank must have felt for many years by the reputation of this body of work. The book had assumed an almost canonic reverence a decade after its publication. Frank felt this came at the expense of his current films and more personal photography.

In this final room, as you turn to the wall opposite, there is a Plexiglas case. In it is the stack of mutilated prints, held fast to a fabric covered plywood board by several metal bolts, the photos then wrapped in baling wire. A legend on the wall nearby reads, “Destroying the Americans.” Here is a rather blurred photo of it:

I don’t quite know how to explain the reaction I had on seeing this. I have never before seen an artist’s retrospective exhibition end with such a deliberate negative statement. Is it merely the dark personal joke of a mythic American artist in the twilight of his mischief posturing, or is there still even now an unresolved ambivalence about how the artist becomes a prisoner of his own creations?

THREE

Here is the link to Shirin Neshat: Iranian Filmmaker.

After winning the “Silver Lion” award at this year’s Venice Film festival, Shirin took her film to the Toronto Film Festival. She has just returned from Stockholm and an exhibition of her photography. Her email gave me an update:

Since the film opened in Venice, the film has been invited to many festivals internationally. For example, this month I’ll be going to London Film Festival and the Vienna Film festival (Viennale), and then to Kunstfilm Biennial in Kol; later it will go to many other countries as well, so it’s wonderful that it’s getting a nice festival run. Meanwhile, the producer told me that it has been sold to around 17 territories, which in this economy is not bad.

Meanwhile, I’m starting to free my mind so I could begin to read new scripts and novels which might inspire me.  I’m thinking more and more about making my next feature film, this time perhaps even more cinematic… looking for the right story for the moment.

Needless to say it feels liberating to have FINALLY finished Women Without Men which at some point we thought to call it, “Women Without an END!!!”

There are few filmmaker or video artists who also have a body of still photo work as powerful, yet as beautiful, as Shirin’s. Yet she, too, must feel constrained by this decade long project.

Here is her self-portrait:

The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas spent his last days in drunken stupor at the legendary Chelsea Hotel on Manhattan’s W.23rd St. He died on Nov. 9, 1953, age 39, while on tour with his poetic play Under Milk Wood. A short distance across town, the Morgan Library at Madison and 36th St., today houses manuscripts of his poems, including the one shown above, a late poem titled “In the White Giant’s Thigh.”

This manuscript is part of an exhibition of recent acquisitions displayed at the former home of financier J.P. Morgan. The poem, written in blue ink in Thomas’ careful calligraphy, rests inside a vitrine. This is an early draft of the poem—38 lines, only 16 of which remain in this order in the published poem. The remaining 22 lines are either revised or abandoned. You can clearly see Thomas’ revisions, a window into the poet’s creative process.

Thomas had a resonant and earthy voice, a troubadour’s even. You can hear him read his short poem “In My Craft or Sullen Art,” about the work of writing poetry, in this video:

In another vitrine is a letter from Vincent Van Gogh to Paul Gauguin. Vincent had taken a house in the center of the old Roman town of Arles earlier in 1888, and here he pleads with his friend Gauguin to join him. Vincent includes a drawing of his modestly furnished bedroom.

Gauguin arrived at the Arles railway station in the dead of night, Oct. 23, and stayed in the odd shaped, yellow house with Van Gogh until their acrimonious separation nine weeks later at Christmas. The story is told in day-by-day detail in Martin Gayford’s book “The Yellow House”

Amazon.com link

By chance I was reading this book at the time I encountered the letter and drawing above. Van Gogh later made a painting from this letter sketch:

Also on display at the Morgan was a manuscript fragment of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony:

Its chicken scrawl jabbings are testament to the legendary personal and compositional untidiness of Ludwig Van. And in contrast, a page from Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” replete with a charming caricature drawn by the composer at the bottom of the page.

Viewing these pieces so closely that I could see the paper fibers was an incredibly intimate experience. It was as near to a physical record of the artistic process as you could ever hope to have. The sense of the immediacy of pen on paper seemed vital and alive. And it is an experience so immediate that there is no parallel in the world of film. In photography, the closest like experience I have had was viewing the actual contact sheets with markings of Robert Frank’s “The Americans,” currently on display at the Met Museum in NYC.

The Morgan Library houses a vast collection of rare books, first editions, incunabula, drawings, watercolors, and photographs—works on paper. If you go to their website, you can choose a slideshow of its many departments, everything meticulously catalogued and preserved. These are records of our culture. Here is a link to the highlights. Wander through the slideshows of the different departments:

www.themorgan.org link

What strikes me here with such force is the wonder that these fragile pieces of paper have survived the ravages of time. What record we do have of the artistic process recorded in these papers, is due to visionary/ obsessive collectors and scholars who have sensed that more than just information resides here: that there inheres a palpable sense of the artist himself that is the particular province of such papers.

I do not collect manuscripts, signatures, or signed first editions (though I recently did acquire a signed first edition of David Foster Wallace’s masterwork, “Infinite Jest.”) But I do understand the almost visceral attraction that “papers” have for both scholar and collector. While I was in production on the film “Must Love Dogs” executive producer Brad Hall and I often shared our love of the music of Gustav Mahler. Director Gary David Goldberg must have overheard us verbally vamping. His wrap gift to me at the end of the show was a handwritten, signed note from Mahler to a colleague. It gives me a frisson of kinship with the great Austrian composer every time I look at it.

Documentary filmmaker Terry Sanders made a film in 1987 called “Slow Fires.”

Amazon.com link

Its point of departure is a conference held in Vienna in the grand Baroque hall of the National Library. Scholars, archivists and preservationists assembled here to discuss the slow deterioration of books and paper archives at libraries around the world. A montage of crumbling books, the “slow fire” of the acidic paper on which most modern books and newsprint are printed, gives grim evidence of what Library of Congress deputy librarian William Welsh calls “embrittlement,” the inexorable decay of paper, crumbling to the touch like dry, autumn leaves. He believes that fully one-quarter of the then 13 million documents in the collection are in severe danger. More than 77,000 additional ones per year are also in jeopardy. Even worse, this is an international phenomenon.

An irony is that the older the document, the more likely it is to be well preserved. Until 150 years ago, most books and papers were rag rather than wood pulp based and were acid free, PH neutral or safely alkaline. It is not so much the deep historic record of man that is at risk (though that as well) but the more recent record of modernity. It is not so much the valuable papers of our culture that are being lost; it is the contracts, court records, pulp fiction, magazines and newspapers that are most at risk.

Such items are not worth much money to collectors and are of arguable artistic merit to libraries such as the Morgan. One scholar says: “The great task of libraries, worldwide, is the preservation of the ordinary.” In 2001, novelist Nicholson Baker wrote a book that attacked what he sees as the systematic destruction of newspapers by some libraries, the very institutions empowered to protect printed materials. The book, “Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper,” has been ground zero for an ongoing controversy about how to preserve humanity’s quotidian records before they turn to dust. He argues that microfiche, digital tapes, and computer files have created a false sense of security.

Amazon.com link

In 1999, he founded the American Newspaper Repository to house and protect the only existing copies of many American newspapers, long consigned to oblivion by libraries.

American Newspaper Repository link

In a July 2000 issue of the New Yorker, Nicholson tells how he bought, saved and stored many 19th century American newspapers.

The New Yorker article link

Oddly enough, many of the newspapers he has saved were in the collection of the British Library. Nicholson bought a trove of them; the other major bidder was a dealer from Pennsylvania who, it seems, intended to cut up the bound volumes and sell individual issues, the ones containing noted historical events, to collectors.

A decade after “Slow Fires,” Sanders made another documentary on the “preservation of knowledge in the electronic age,” called “Into the Future.”

Amazon.com link

The issues addressed in this film extend the concerns for preservation of materials into new media, as well as the explosion of information from broadcast and electronic systems. There are interviews with Peter Norton and Tim Berners-Lee, “father of the world wide web,” both of whom question if and how we will be able to store and access information in formats that, unlike print, are not visible to the human eye. A promo logline for the film simply asks, “Will humans twenty, fifty, one hundred years from now have access to the electronically recorded history of our time?” A decade has passed since the making of this film, a decade where we are beginning to see these nightmares come true, as older tape formats fade into obsolescence. The much discussed AMPAS’ Sci-Tech Committee report, The Digital Dilemma, itself now two years old, addresses the manifold dimensions of the problem. I wrote a “Filmmakers Forum” essay in the June, 2008 issue of American Cinematographer magazine that discusses the concerns that many of us filmmakers have regarding the migrating of film materials into ever-changing digital tape formats.

The AMPAS report can be downloaded from their website. While its focus is mainly on motion pictures, there are reports on challenges in the fields of medicine, science, military, education and libraries. It makes for alarming reading:

www.oscars.org — The Digital Dilemma report link

Into the Future has interviews with several noted archivists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Michael Martin of the JPL Planetary Data System division says simply that using any kind of tape as an archival medium is a “disaster.” Colleague Gary Walker gives a dramatic illustration of a then new 9-track reader that had been modified to try to migrate a tape recorded on an obsolete 7-track machine. The tape stutters back and forth, locked in semi rotation, a process he calls “maytaging,” as it struggles to transfer the information. And a few minutes later in the documentary, Jeff Rothenberg from RAND Corporation explains that most scientists are not much concerned with preservation. Their impetus is to “drop the past” and “charge into the future” looking for “new paradigms.”

This willful ostrich-like attitude is maybe understandable in a realm of science that places so much value on research—on the next new thing. But in the world of education and of protection of our cultural and historical heritage, it is irresponsible. And sadly, such willful abnegation of our motion picture history and archives is not difficult to find in some studio executive suites that are focused only on next week’s “tentpole” release and the quarterly stock report.

There is an irony to this debate about paper, tape or digital as the more enduring record of our culture. In the very early days of filmmaking, there was no mechanism for the copyright of finished movies. Paper prints were made from the finished motion picture, a frame-by-frame record. Only these were accepted by the Library of Congress as having the same protection as books. The individual frames of paper movies could be copyrighted. And that is how many very early films have been preserved, lovingly transferred by archivists from paper back to film, long after the nitrate negatives were lost or destroyed.

So, we are now back to paper, and to the Morgan Library vitrines that riveted me last month for several hours. There is something so immediate, so personal about the one-on-one encounter with these intensely personal pieces of paper. It is visceral, sensual. Certainly for my generation and perhaps for yours, even as a reader, it is much more compelling to hold a real book in your hands, rather than stare onto a computer screen— or even into the very convenient Kindle that Amazon seems intent on hawking to all of America, the first thing you see on the Amazon homepage being a pitch to buy a Kindle.

Having said this, I admit that I am now reading Dracula from an online site (the book is in public domain) as part of the ongoing Infinite Summer national read that began last summer with David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest:

www.gutenberg.org Dracula link

I want to finish this essay on preservation with a very personal story. In early Sept. of 2001, I was in Galway, Ireland, conducting a week long filmmaking workshop. Afterwards, I decided to spend a few days in Dublin. I wanted to see the Abbey Theater and go to the sea coast at Sandycove to tread the stairs of the Martello Tower where James Joyce lived briefly, and where the first scene of his novel, “Ulysses,” unfolds.

James Joyce Tower link

On the afternoon of the 11th I walked over to Trinity College, which is located in central Dublin. I went into the Long Room of the library, one of the great repositories of early printed books. The room itself is an architectural marvel, its high vaulted ceiling and lengthy, narrow main floor look like the nave of a Gothic cathedral. The side “altars” on several floors are filled chock-a-block with the sacred relics of incunabula and rare tomes. Mounted on pedestals along the sides of the nave are busts of writers, a canonic literary Stations of the Cross.

Just beyond the Long Room is a small museum that houses the Book of Kells, a four volume medieval illuminated manuscript of the New Testament. It is one of the masterpieces of Western civilization dating back to the 9th century, transcribed from the even older Latin Vulgate. It is richly illustrated and the covers are incised, gilt and vividly colored.

Wikipedia Book of Kells article link

A multimedia display highlights the history of the book. Every day, a page is turned in each of the two displayed volumes.

This tourist friendly exhibit is like the Morgan Library on steroids; nonetheless, the experience becomes intensely moving.

It was while I was studying a page from the Gospel of John that the first plane struck the north tower of the World Trade Center.

The horrible irony of viewing one of the oldest, most venerated records of Western Civilization at the very moment that, an ocean away, rabid ideologues were destroying the Mecca of capitalist commerce, has been rooted in my soul ever since. What are the relentlessly warring parts of our nature that can both create and destroy on such a scale?

While researching this piece and thinking about the glories of culture embedded in and guarded by the world’s great libraries, public and private, I could not help but also reflect on the depravations that have been made upon these same institutions, of the attempts to eradicate an entire people’s history: of the burning of the great library of Alexandria in Ptolemaic Egypt; of Cardinal Cisneros torching the Moorish libraries of Granada, the last stronghold of Islam in Spain; of Torahs ripped from synagogues in Germany and book burnings of branded “degenerate” writers, in public bonfires during the Third Reich; of the wanton Serb shelling and firebombing of the National Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo.

Our libraries are a promise and a threat. Where some see them as portals to an examined life, a life enriched by close, intimate encounters with our cultural documents, others see nothing that matters, or worse, only threats to their hidebound, dark orthodoxies.

You’re standing on a Manhattan street trying to hail a taxi. Dozens pass by; most are “off duty,” headed back to the barn. Finally one pulls over and you and your friend(s) get in. Suddenly an array of lights in the headliner goes off, flashing like a disco parlor; there’s a vapid music sting; the driver turns around and says, “You’re in the Cash Cab, a TV game show.”

The show’s tagline is: “There are 13,000 cabs in New York City but there’s only one that pays you.”

The driver is no sullen, flaky, linguistically or geographically challenged guy but your game show’s genial, buzz-cut, clearly Caucasian host, Ben Bailey (no relation as far as I know). As he drives you to your destination, he fires off a series of general knowledge questions. Correct answers win money at increasing levels. The complete rules are pretty simple. Here they are as stated on the official website:

The questions start out on the easy side, then get harder along the way—the harder the question, the more money it’s worth. The first four questions are worth $25 for each correct answer. The next four are worth $50 and then every question after that is worth $100.

A correct answer is awarded the cash; an incorrect answer means the contestant gets a strike. The contestants can earn cash all the way to their destination. But the second they miss their third question (i.e., earn their third strike), Ben pulls the Cash Cab over and ejects them onto the sidewalk, no matter where they are!

If they get stumped on a question, contestants can “shout out” for help, either by calling someone on our mobile phone (a “Mobile Shout-Out”), or by asking someone on the street for help (a “Street Shout-Out”). Each contestant only has one Mobile and one Street Shout-Out during the course of each game.

If the contestant has won at least $200 and the cab hits a red light, a “Red Light Challenge” is offered, which is a single question with multiple part answers. The passenger has 30 seconds to get all answers (e.g., name all seven of Snow White’s dwarfs). If the contestant gets each part of the answer correct, they win $200; if time expires, they move on without receiving any strikes against them.

Finally, if the contestant arrives at their destination having earned cash, they can opt to bet it all—double or nothing—on a “Video Bonus Question.”

The show runs on Discovery Channel, half-hour multiple episodes back to back in late afternoon—at the same time as MSNBC’s “Countdown” and “Rachel Maddow Show.” It makes for great channel toggling during commercials.

To see the game in action here’s a clip of three girls, headed uptown to 45th and 3rd:

These girls are really excited, up for it. Some players are more blasé, some pretty clueless. Some players get kicked out of the cab with three wrong answers way before getting to their destination—double losers.

There is something incredibly infectious about this show as I found out when I started to track reactions online. For some, it’s addictive in a way that a normal TV quiz show isn’t. Maybe it’s because it’s on wheels. Maybe it’s the spontaneity and total informality of it. Maybe it’s the sense of a shared few moments in a stranger’s life. It does feel like life caught on the fly. Well, the truth (of course) is a little more complicated.

Here’s another clip of even bigger winners. These three players, a married couple and an obviously “professor” older gent wearing a red bow tie, are headed to the 42nd St. Public Library, probably to do some research. Unlike the girls in the previous clip they are risk takers and opt for the “video bonus,” double or nothing. Ben Bailey tells us they are from the Borough of Manhattan Community College. No wonder they’re big winners. Their combined IQ, if they had a longer trip, might have put Discovery Channel in “Jeopardy”:

But not everyone’s a winner. Here are four women who call themselves the “Lascivious Biddies.” They are a “girl band”—without a drummer. They get off to a slow start, look good midway, but turn greedy on the video bonus:

Here’s some background information on the show. Like many of these game shows it’s an American version of one created in England. There are also Canadian and Australian variants. Reading the rules on Wikipedia, it seems the American version is clearly the most engaging:

Wikipedia Cash Cab article link

There are, I think, five principal camera angles inside the cab: a wide shot of all passengers; a single on the most featured passenger; a raking shot of passengers from the driver side; a raking single on the driver, Ben Bailey, from the passenger side; an angle from the rear of the cab shooting past the passengers to the driver. These are small HD cameras, locked off. There is also an exterior camera on top, pointed up the street, and another that captures the players entering the cab. A follow vehicle contains an operator with a handheld camera that shoots the players exiting the cab at the end of the game. He also shoots follow shots and moving POVs of street life.

Bailey wears an earpiece in his left ear, visible only when he turns sharply to the right. This is how he is fed the questions and answers. Riding “shotgun” and always off camera and unheard is an assistant who cues the lights and music. He enters the cab only after the riders have agreed to play the game.

Riders are often randomly picked up off the streets. However, some are screened as potential contestants for a new game show. They are told that a taxi will pick them up and bring them to the set. The cab that picks them up, of course, is the Cash Cab. They do not know ahead of time that the “quiz show” will take place in a moving taxi. Each episode has multiple gamers and is tightly edited to keep the pace brisk and to avoid any sense of gridlocked traffic—a real NYC fantasy.

As in any game show there is pleasure in answering the questions along with the players. But one thing that distinguishes Cash Cab is its quick succession of so many players. There is a broad juggling of ages and social and ethnic types. These encounters often play topsy-turvy with your expectations. It’s a lot like having a random street conversation with any New Yorker. The intimacy of the game, a really ordinary setting, and a “host” who is in fact a licensed New York hack driver, all create the feeling that you, the viewer, is inside the cab, playing along.

There seem to be at least two actual NYC cabs used. The medallion numbers are 1G12 and, less frequently spotted, 7N78. If you are a New York resident, you have a chance of hailing Bailey’s cab. But you are more likely to be successful if you are a tourist. There is a penchant to recruit and pick up people at tourist venues where people are less likely to be savvy to the game. Several weeks ago walking on Central Park West I overheard a local couple talking about how much time they have spent looking for Bailey’s taxi. New Yorkers get hip to any gig really fast.

Here’s one catch. When Bailey makes the payoff, he waves a fistful of cash money in your face before handing it over. It’s prop money. Your actual “cash” is a check; and yes, the check’s in the mail …Now that’s real show business.