Living in Boston, I’ve seen a number of extraordinary people give talks and presentations, but last year at the Harvard Film Archive, Kathryn Bigelow struck me as particularly brilliant. Bigelow was a painter before she was a film maker. A downtown artist, a fellow at the Whitney Museum, a student of Vito Acconci and Susan Sontag. Her first film, made in grad school, featured Sylvère Lotringer and Marshall Blonsky. But her action films aren’t a rejection of her background, rather, they expand on it. She has made a deliberate decision to speak to as wide an audience as possible, and in doing so never sacrificed her vision. Her favorite word to describer her work is “experiential.” In an excellent post, the best thing I’ve read about her work yet, Steven Shaviro, further explains this quality of “sensory immersion.” Of course her win is a milestone. Especially since it means the issue of women in film longer a question of capability. More women than men are in the Whitney Biennial this year, and they had the strongest work. Kathryn Bigelow won because she made the best film. Here she is with Charlie Rose. Near Dark is the perfect movie to watch at 5 am. Such an inspiration.
Nina Paley, director of Sita Sings the Blues, the 2008 animated film that nearly wasn’t released due to frustrating copyright restrictions on the Annette Hanshaw soundtrack (the recordings were in the public domain, but the songs were not) is now making minute-long films about copyright restrictions and artistic freedom. Here are the first two Minute Memes, Copying Is Not Theft and All Creative Work Is Derivative.
“There is no culture here in California, only trash. And we who grew up here and live here and write here have nothing else to include as elements in our work. … The West Coast has no tradition, no dignity, no ethics – this is where that monster Richard Nixon grew up. … [O]ne must work with the trash, pit it against itself.” – Philip K Dick. In a six part series, LAT interviews his friends and family giving a good picture of his middle age, paying particular attention to how California influenced his work. Read I am Alive And You Are Dead, if you haven’t yet. And here’s me with the PKD robot. His head went missing not to long after that photo was taken. Besdies Blade Runner, of course, most of his books were turned into unremarkable films…but I hope someone does Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said right, as it’s one of his more slapstick, cinematic novels. Really though, I would love to see someone like Lynne Ramsey or Darren Aronofsky take on Confessions of a Crap Artist.
How to Frame the Internet II: Entertainment and Culture Post iPad
Mainstream since the 50s, but rarely used since the early 80s craze, 3D is now expected of every major movie these days.
Why? You can’t download 3d glasses, let alone an IMAX theater. It’s the staging of an event, a singular experience. Something that cannot be so easily replicated at home.
Likewise, in 2008, I wrote a post How to Frame the Internet, calling for the staging of events online:
The problem I see in terms of editing online content seems to be the absence of “frames.” Time frames as well as frames as a metaphor: ways of segmenting information so it doesn’t overlap with other content or ideas, complementary or not. Creating scarcity when there is abundance and understanding how to work with the desire that grows in anticipation of something.
I can’t remember the comedian — I want to say someone Saturday Night Live affiliated — but he was making a point about repetition in sketch comedy. You tell a joke once and it’s funny (well, sometimes, in the case of SNL.) Tell it again, it’s not funny. Tell it a third time it’s funny again. The next several times it’s really not funny, but if you keep repeating it after ten times and keep going, each of those times the joke is funny (this is, of course, a total perversion of the law of diminishing marginal returns.)
Art filmmakers are aware of the boredom they inflict when they hold a certain shot just a moment too long. Horror films especially are cruel games of anticipation. It is agonizing to watch the girl go down the steps to the basement tiptoe after tiptoe sooooo slowwwly.
The great change we are waiting for, the one that will make newsworthy information part of one’s daily media diet is online content that will acknowledge and work around a user’s lack of patience. This means creating an event out of what is being presented… Make viewers mark in their calendars for it. Make them miss it if they miss it.
Twitter often takes this role. For the past few years, I make a point of watching the State of the Union as it airs, rather than later on in the evening, at a time more convenient to my schedule. Only then can I keep up with the tweets and status updates from friends and bloggers I follow.
In terms of segmenting information, I’m very enthusiastic about the iPad. One aspect in particular is intriguing, and it is the very aspect that annoys Gizmodo so much: No Multitasking.
This is a backbreaker. If this is supposed to be a replacement for netbooks, how can it possibly not have multitasking? Are you saying I can’t listen to Pandora while writing a document? I can’t have my Twitter app open at the same time as my browser? I can’t have AIM open at the same time as my email? Are you kidding me? This alone guarantees that I will not buy this product.
- Gizmodo, 8 Things That Suck About the iPad
Here is the slow web in effect. The opportunity to focus on the one task at hand. Combined with the intimacy of the device, we’re going to see an entirely new way of interacting with information.
It is a more reflective way, one that might even correct some of the signal-to-noise issues we’ve for so long taken as a given of the digital age. Also in 2008, I wrote about how I feel the iPhone (and now the iPad) could gradually kill off some of the more inane youtube comments. From the post Reading Only Devices: Why iPhone, Kindle, and Tablet PCs Might Mean Smarter Blog Comments:
If more and more people start reading online media on mobile phones and Kindle, the incentive to leave a comment will go down dramatically. Do you really want to save this post for later and comment in a couple hours? Or do you want to struggle with writing something on the inadequate keyboard?
We might also see growth in devices that divorce writing from reading… A computer is designed to do both things at once so you no longer even think of reading while writing as multitasking. Often times the experience of writing an email is consuming and processing at once: as the message you are writing and the message you are responding to are in the same frame. I’m not old enough to remember the conventions of handwritten letters, but I doubt my grandmother sat at her desk composing a letter to her friend with her friend’s prior letter folded above it, going line by line, making sure she’s responded to every question in sequence.
The keyboard is closer to you than the screen. Many of us scroll the screen with the same keys we compose letters. It’s wonderful in that it has made us a more literary culture, but it also means a lot of great stuff gets lost in the abundance of online text.
If Kindle becomes more popular, and more laptops start including tablets, I think users will grow accustomed to reading without having to add their .02 once they get to the end. Which means those who do, might have something really interesting to say.
I actually prefer my iPhones inability to multitask. It’s putting a constraint on me… and my worst multi-tabbing, unfocused habits. If I can’t so easily navigate to another app or another page, I won’t.
The iPad is effectively dividing two experiences: reading and writing. This means actively listening to another person’s words, and having the time to think of what to say before typing. This is better communication. This is the future.
Previously:
It’s really, really hard to write about yourself, photograph yourself, or film yourself without annoying people, but Ross McElwee somehow has a knack for it. Sherman’s March is a must-Netflix, if you haven’t already. Now Steve Carr (Daddy Day Care, Next Friday, Paul Blart: Mall Cop) wants to turn it into a film. Now, when McElwee was shooting every minute of his life in the last 70s and early 80s, it was extremely bizarre, today, it wouldn’t alarm anyone. Given this, I really hope Carr uses the opportunity to reflect on our over-cameraed era.
Chaos Reigns! I was a guest on Steady Diet of Film podcast with Erin Donovan. We talked about Lars von Trier’s Antichrist… the greatest DeBeers commercial of all time.
The Bullitt chase scene on Google Maps. Also a Risky Business map “detailing Tom Cruise and Rebecca DeMornay’s exploits in a gold Porsche 928.”
Kathryn Bigelow is finally getting her due (Steady Diet of Film, Slate, Salon, etc.) This month Harvard Film Archive has a retrospective of her work (see her in person July 2nd, introducing Hurt Locker.) In addition to Near Dark, Point Break, and Strange Days, among others, Bigeow also directed part of the prescient Scientology critique Wild Palms.
“Away We Go was directed by Sam Mendes during a post-production furlough from Revolutionary Road, and, viewed side-by-side, the films form a curious diptych—two portraits, separated by a half-century, of young couples trying to find their place in the world, one adapted from a writer, Richard Yates, who was among the most prescient of his generation, the other from a writer who ranks among the most precious of his.” – Scott Foundas in Village Voice. The pairing results in something like a “Mumblecore movie made by David Lean.” (via.) More from A. O. Scott, who ends his review “This movie does not like you.” (to a “‘oh no he di’nt’ chorus of praise” all over the Internet, as Cinetrix puts it.) But pretty much everything IFC links to here is gold.
What happens to filmmakers who can’t market themselves? “Many of the best filmmakers are allergic to the idea of selling their films. They feel it somehow diminishes them as artists. They want to create; they don’t want to be hucksters. They want their work to speak for itself. They sometimes act like they don’t want to be successful, that there is something actually distasteful about success. Many have told me flat out that they are proud of their film but doubt it will reach much of an audience. I worked on three films with a director long ago. His movies were funny, witty, stylish, and had a dazzling visual style. There were so many reasons why all kinds of people could enjoy them. But every interview he gave made them seem dry and boring; he cut off the possibilities for the way different kinds of people might perceive them. He was effectively an anti-marketer.” (via.)
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