Knowing the language of myth
Relations with the dead and 'hello' new clock
Listening in on the worst conversing
We inversely proportion our share
And share alike with sun spotted eyes
In the mind we see past
Future dream in daytime
Memory paste spilling closed eyes
All we see is all we saw
Drawing upon self experience
Scribbling upon printed text
For self expression pressed against you
Your ass is dancing your feet don't move
Scultping masterpiece each step precision
Perfection in form my gloss my polish
Weather happens sands away
Dust spills polish fade
Shape is left forms untouched
Newly roughed and poorly kept
Scratched and broken becomes you
Time has finished what we tried to perfect
Essence and matter goodbye control
Goodbye spelling the language devolution
Goodbye my smooth surface
Tried to make it be me
the broken more beautiful
My smudged lens sublime
My tears my stains my dirty surface
How can the language explain
More love to the weathered
More joy in the pain
My suffering beauty
My torn fashionista
Wrapped up in yesterdays blanket
Old fabric still strongest
Running from mass production
Gold the oldest living paper
Only records wear away
Skipping music they still play
Hear it? An improvement
Congratulations your work is loved
This site is devoted to film and filmmaking, but also to the visual language as a whole. Examples of work that move the medium forward and craft the language can be found anywhere, but rarely are they found on television. TV is a storytelling medium where the writer and actor (and frequently, anyone at all) are filtered through a camera as a functional mechanism of delivery, not necessarily as an instrument and not necessarily with regard or concern at having a reflexive relationship with its own existence, more or less chiefly concerned with increasing the potency by which consumer and creator can become more drugged up on it. Television's instinctual drive toward more television, increased streams of Audio/visual information at more rapid paces with increasingly prevalent attitudes of 'who gives a shit?' is a perfect approximation of life in the 21st century, so much so that I would call it brilliant were every television channel and program originating form one singular mind. I'd say it had its finger on the pulse. I make no bones about my distaste for the box, and the damaging effects it's had on filmmaking as well as human beings in general. That having been said, it's been co-opted in interesting ways over its 75 or so year history as America's favorite piece of furniture.
Despite a childhood spent with near-daily contact with the thing, as well as years earning the rent working on its programs, I feel starkly out of touch with what it is. A distant memory that can still be recalled from early life, a feeling that it was once enjoyable, but trying to relive that enjoyment in the present results only in nausea; like fast food or cigarettes or any other other of the myriad curios one must suck it up, grow up and move on from. Cessation from any vice is a strange experience, but after 10 years without a television it's not something I notice on a daily basis.
Enter Twin Peaks.
Yes, the point of this ramble. It was also 10 years ago, coincidentally, that I first laid eyes on this lone gem of television, inarguably in a class of its own. Something like this rips through the fabric of the status quo feed of information and will never allow it to return to its former legitimacy. Twin Peaks will return in exactly one year's time after a 25 year gap between season 2 and 3. Unprecedented and a miracle that it's truly happening.
It's the best thing that ever aired on television because it's not part of the rat race of television programming, it's a distorted Fun House mirror being held up to television and reflecting our world back at us, with a dose of spirituality and soap opera. It fulfills the classic check list of what makes great TV with an engaging plot, incredible dialogue and memorable characters and somehow also provides none of them in the classic sense. If you try to judge it against another show it won't compete because it's playing on a different field. Twin Peaks created its own arena that many have tried and none have succeeded at playing in.
The Pilot is a work of art, though I don't recall initially falling in love with it. In fact, the whole show is a confusing jumble of various genre tropes and mixed emotions; the magic doesn't start to take hold until a few episodes into the first season when the seemingly scattershot construction can be seen for the deft balancing act the show is actually achieving.
Season 1, by and large, is good. It's not pushing itself into greatness, but it sets the stage and grows itself nicely.
Season 2 is where the first season comes to fruition. For the most part it is better on all levels. Gone is even the hint that the show is random or oblique in any way, the series is finally revealed for the deeply unsettling and deeply felt journey that it truly is. Well, until it "peaks" with its seventh episode, Lonely Souls. Here, the series hits its high note, one of the most profoundly affecting swatches of time in any visual medium.
In the second season's eighth episode, the turn for the worst begins. It's still the show you know and love, but something is different. Gone is the depth, the profundity, the connection you've been building over the course of it all. Everything seems, well, scattershot again, confusing bits of faux comedy crop up that lead nowhere, you're suddenly questioning whether the show had a point to it in the first place. The creative team waste no time shuffling plot lines and shoving necessary characters onto the back burner (or off the screen entirely). Bad decisions abound, the show becomes literal in a way it was never meant to. Within a few episodes it's an absolute bore, you're wondering how something could go south so quickly.
The rest of the season goes no better, in fact, it continues to miss the mark. The unfortunate part is, the mark was created by the first 14 or so episodes of the series. If there's one offensive bit of Twin Peaks, it's that it creates the thing you crave and then deprives you of it, creates its own standard of quality and then royally screws any attempt to reach it for the rest of the season. Watching the show pantomime itself is disappointing at first and eventually embarrassing.
Then the finale of season 2 arrives. Suddenly, the show you knew and loved returns for one incredible moment. You're not sorry for waiting while the show fumbled and stumbled, botching literally everything it had taken so long to get so right. The finale of the second season is worth all of the God awful nonsense that makes up episodes 9 - 21.
Looking forward to writing more on the topic beyond this in the year ahead.
Looking back at this year, I can say something I've often wanted to and now feel fully justified. The cinema is changing into one that has become more about personal choice than about unifying aesthetic and that can only be a good thing. From all of the angles of cast and crew that are so oft pointed to, the influx of masculine pictures, feminine pictures and the like have only helped to strengthen the possibilities, and this year has seen a healthy movement beyond the politics that govern such things.
Sure, we're still seeing the worst offenders from the mainstream, as usual with this facet of culture (it's unfair to refer to it as the mainstream, as there no longer is one mainstream, let's call it the commercial culture), its commercialism and commodification as its defining features. Commercial culture is producing films that feign understanding at the new cinema, but those who are paving the way see it clearly. They're not afraid to be action-oriented, as Fuller put it "you're not making a film, you're making a motion picture", the new pensive cinema doesn't need to slow it down to be thought-provoking. Also, we're not attached to technical and aesthetic standards at all. Many of 2015's best films were shot in the 4:3 aspect ratio .. some were shot on iPhone .. some were in black & white. You see what I'm saying, the films were in an array of visual choices and the movie-going culture accepted it with ease.
It feels like uncharted territory. These intangible ingredients in content can neither be measured nor quantified, but they are under the surface of all movements. Personally, back in 2006 when making my own shorts on the Sony 150, seeing a personal idol like Lynch employ it for Inland Empire was a huge boost. I owe a lot to the 5D for subsequent projects, and as much currently to the Blackmagic - the filmmaker's relationship to the camera exists as much as their relationship to the DP, the actors, the script, etc.
In the 1960's, the new wave (debatably the catalyst, yes) set a fire of experimentation across Europe as filmmakers riffed off of each other's ideas in a perfect storm of experimentation that drove the medium forward. How much of an impact did the climate of creativity have on the works of Fellini, Bunuel, Bergman, Antonioni and others? How did it affect American filmmakers who followed their work? A camera is just a camera, but cinema today feels new in an exciting way thanks to digital production, suddenly the old rules don't seem to matter anymore. Frances Ha may not be the second coming of cinema that convinces the nay-sayers that a new age is upon us, but as far as low-budget goes, it was a new model entirely. The crew worked for an egalitarian payment model where the Producers, DP, PA's, HMU, etc. were all payed the same (absurdly low) rate, with the rationale that it was a labor of love. Debate away as to whether or not this is robbery on the part of production, but in a very real sense it opens up creative potential to operate at such low cost.
Yes, this wave is akin to what happened to the music industry - Record labels have stuck to their model of mining for promising talent, pumping cash into making a polished product out of them, and marketing the shit out of their work, catching the majority of public attention. However, soundcloud et al have produced a digital underground in production and distribution that is leaps and bounds ahead of the industry on the creative level. Will it result in the death of industry and the rise of the independent artist? Or will the labels just borrow the innovation from the digital revolution and incorporate it into the product? We'll see. This digital cinema wave is digital in the sense of distribution as well. The model has been cracked and we won't know for many years whether the impact has been positive, negative or remained status quo.
Call them what you will. Some see them as the essential lifeline that allows a work to be created, the other extreme, as a parasite that eventually devours its host. Whatever the case, the viewing public's relationship with television and film content over the decades has only gotten deeper and more intense. Give them the right revival of The X-Files or Jurassic Park at the right time and they'll fall out of their chairs with gratitude. Screw around with their favorite franchise and feel the vitriol for generations. Is any of this healthy? Is anyone benefiting? Is excessive fan knowledge actually stifling creativity?
Questions like this have been posed recently, but it's on my mind now with the new Star Wars film only months away. From the days of the mid-1970's to now, fan culture has turned out an audience increasingly well-versed in the lore of every franchise from Marvel to Star Wars to Lord of the Rings. The more popular the property, the more rabid the base is about having encyclopedic knowledge of the mythos and eccentric details of the characters, etc. This stuff can get so intricate that the creators themselves need extra staff devoted to keeping all of it straight. For fear, of course, that any contradiction will cause an uprising of these fickle fans to denounce the property and head for some competitor's all-engrossing fiction.
A number of online discussions and media publication "trailer breakdowns" have been released en masse speculating on SW7's plot details from the scant shots shown in the trailer. This stuff makes my head spin with the vast array of literature and history on the subject that someone, like myself, who's only seen the six films couldn't possibly connect the dots of "character A was mentioned in a throwaway line in the prequels and surely will feature prominently in the plot of the new film, the little dot moving around in the background when you freeze-frame R2D2 proves it". While that would be impressive if Abrams and Kasdan actually read up enough on the details to create something that pleases this audience, is it necessarily good storytelling to make a film so convoluted that it needs to be explained ad nauseam in essays on a fictitious universe? How does it help the mythology and enrich the experience if I need to know as much about fabricated star-history as I know about real history? Instead of a vacuum that only relates to itself, isn't the mythos stronger if it is used to abstractly relate to actual, real concepts and events?
The psychology ain't hard to dissect, the fan feels such a deep connection to the IP and they desperately want it to be reciprocated. I get it. You're not some run-of-the-mill, casual, fair-weather fan of The Dallas Cowboys, you're THE fan of the Dallas Cowboys and your collection of merchandise, your season tickets and the ritualistic regularity with which you attend their games proves it. On the flip side, you're not just ANY lover of Marvel superheroes; YOU LIVE FOR IT. You stood for 12 hours in the freezing cold just to score prime seats for the first showing of the trailer for Ant Man, you've suffered for what you love, devoted countless hours, blood, sweat and tears to this, you DESERVE a little something in return. For these unique individuals, JJ Abrams owes it to them to find some bizarre nugget of character information that was only mentioned in the limited print of a book released in 1987 and turn it into a massive piece of the puzzle for his new film. Justification for the time spent will finally arrive in the form of those sweet, sweet confused expressions on Joe Star Wars Fan's faces all throughout the theater. Only the faithful will know the truth.
Myths tell an abstract tale that the listener (or viewer) can apply to their own human experience. While the initial trilogy told a complex human story of a bright kid painfully learning the dark truths of his own world to the point where it almost consumes him, the latter trilogy told an equally complex myth of a bright, albeit petty, kid whose immaturity leads to the creation of those dark truths. The prequel episodes of Star Wars cautioned the audience toward a world where complacency and self-interest can turn a functioning society into a destructive empire. The biggest difference I can see between the two is that the earlier films told the tale in a lean way, where characters served a narrative and thematic purpose, while in the later films (and most blockbusters with a built-in base) perform the feat backwards as the mythology chases the juggling act of the story/world. Star Wars is a perfect example of a myth whose own mythology ran away with it. Each film added more bloated histories and character details to the overall plot, while the thematic implications become more and more pared down, more marginalized, until they were barely noticeable on the surface. No one seemed more confused than George Lucas, for the record, who blamed the viewer for not being able to grasp his metaphor in a sea of confusing characters who are introduced and killed off before we even learn their names and a bunch of screaming, shrieking, hyper-active CGI creatures that all look vaguely the same.
It's a troubling shift from simple plots with weighty undertones to weighty plots with simple undertones where "getting it right" means story continuity wasn't contradicted ("in the comic book, character A DID have green hair! Great accuracy!") rather than ramping up emotional and thematic complexity with each installment. The overall work is dragged down trying to get actors who superficially resemble the character is the book, rather than one who can play the part; plot is enslaved to hitting all the same beats as the book rather than taking liberties that enhance the writer and director of the screen adaptation(I stress adaptation)'s ability to communicate their own ideas, etc. Most of the fandom then plays tough-guy, beating the drum that they don't care about what some Hollywood hotshot wants to say with their favorite story, but turn into drooling idiots when they see the Hollywood effects budget plastered all over the screen. (ok, I'm generalizing, sorry)
To completely digress - It was late 2002, SW Episode II had just been released on DVD, fan excitement was still high for the final film and fans were pouring over I and II looking for any small detail to theorize about how Lucas might shock the core audience with something oddball. It was clearly not going to happen. What purpose, besides a momentary cheap thrill for the director, would be served by pulling the rug out from under the audience's feet? In an incredibly detailed diatribe, one blogger (God, I wish I could find it all these years later) had an immensely complicated theory about why the droid R2D2 was actually a spy for the 'bad guys', with a massive amount of evidence to back up the thought process. Nevermind that Lucas actually writing such a thing into the script would make little to no sense for anyone but this guy writing the theory, it's the kind of thing that would only pop into someone's mind on the 1,000th viewing, even Lucas had not put a fraction of the amount of thought into this movie that the fan had. I'm seeing the same things everywhere now, with volumes of "Luke turning the dark side" theories and why it would be a great move to pull the rug out from under the fans' feet.
The 'pull the rug out' as a main objective of creators was outlandish and implausible 10 years ago, and yet fan culture in the present world makes me actually buy it. Audience expectation and the crowd with vast amounts of knowledge on superfluous details has started to reign supreme. Abrams would be applauded for some insane twist that adds nothing to the undertones or thematic backbone of the work, but merely causes empty gasps and "oh no he didn't!" from a fan base who cares more about the color of the paint on the spaceships.
Are modern myths being co-opted by bloated backstories and a fan base willing to hold creators to it, or is this nit-pick not holding any water? It would be easy to say "If you don't want the fans to hold you to it, don't make a Star Wars movie" but creative young talent like Rian Johnson and JJ Abrams, even with all of their clout, would be hard pressed to get their own original space opera off the ground. They're afforded the opportunity to make big films by attaching themselves to a franchise, but then have to contend with the Trekkies, etc. boxing in the storyline to suit everything that came before it. They smile and attend comic-con and seem to relish the fan base, but I can't help but find it all constrictive.
First day on the brand new site, feels good. All previous materials will end up here throughout the coming months and be archived, of course.
Let's talk mantras for a moment, the site has collected works from all angles involving film and video, anything and everything. There'll be video content to watch, visual essays, written essays, this blog, etc. The aim is to curate, but also to add a context, a narrative to the evolution of the visual language. The visual language began with paintings on a cave wall and continues to this day as a universal method of communication that plays across cultures and divides, it's a language of symbols and visual cues. What separates photography and cinema from the previous visual mediums is their ability to take control of the eye, crafting a surrogate field of vision, the act of seeing through the eyes of another. This internet enclave will detail the vocabulary, grammar and greatest works of a language that is able to speak in abstract concepts and emotions just as easily as I type these words.
As a first foray, I'd recommend a few films be taken into account. Below are selected works, five per decade and will be the first films reviewed on the site.
1910's Cabiria(1914), Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages(1916), and Broken Blossoms, or The Yellow Man and the Girl (1919).
1920's Greed (1924), The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), The Docks of New York (1929).
1930's The Blood of a Poet (1930), L'Atalante (1934), The Twentieth Century (1934), Alexander Nevsky (1938) , The Rules of the Game (1939).
1940's The Palm Beach Story (1942), The Lost Weekend (1945), Gilda (1946), My Darling Clementine (1946), The Red Shoes (1948).
1950's Winchester '73 (1950), The Big Heat (1953), Aprajito (1956), The Sweet Smell of Success (1957), Hiroshima mon Amour (1959).
1960's L'Avventura (1960), Harakiri (1962), Chelsea Girls (1966), Week End (1967), Faces (1968).
1970's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), Scenes from a Marriage (1973, TV Version), Killer of Sheep (1977), Stalker (1979).
1980's Every Man for Himself (1980), My Dinner with Andre (1981), Possession (1981), Body Double (1984), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986).
1990's Naked Lunch (1991), Basic Instinct (1992), Dead Man (1995), Lost Highway (1997), Eyes Wide Shut (1999).
2000's Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), Y tu Mama Tambien (2001), Tropical Malady (2004), Battle in Heaven(2005), A Serious Man (2009).
2010's Uncle Boonmee, Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), Certified Copy (2010), Tabu(2012), Goodbye to Language 3D (2014), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)