Exuberance is Beauty

“From Tehran comes the shocking news that Jafar Panahi, one of the finest of Iranian filmmakers, has been sentenced to six years in prison. The sentence also bans him from filmmaking for twenty years, forbids him to leave the country, and forbids him from giving interviews to the press, foreign or domestic. Panahi’s collaborator Muhammad Rasoulof was also sentenced to six years in jail.”

Read Bordwell’s entire piece here.

Visit ‘Free Jafar Panahi’ on Facebook, here.

Please let your voice be heard, so that Iran and the rest of the world aren’t deprived of Panahi’s.

Posted by Såladin.

Skin Skin Skin. I’m obsessed.

My attempt to cure cold air dryness on my face with Dermaglow’s moisturizing serum was a total FAIL. It didn’t work whatsoever. I diligently used it as directed, every day but nothing. Skin still scaly. And red. Ugh.

I even saw my Dermatologist about it and she scolded me for using oils (I’m still into the almond oil around my eyes). She insisted that all oils will clog pores and cause breakouts. Strike one since I know people with incred skin who swear by oils. Then she recommended two products to me, both of which contained parabens. Strike two. Strike three is passive-aggresive because she’s leaving the practice for a new office further away. Buh-bye.

I’m also determined to use natural products that don’t cost a million dollars. While I do really like Origin’s products for cleansing/exfoliating, I’m not so hot on their creams/serums so when searching The Bay for an alternative, I stumbled upon a line called Exuberance is Beauty.

Their products are certified organic, paraben and sulfate free, colour free and do not test on animals. Their website and founder blog are also great – very inspiring/inspired. I purchased the Indian Rose calming facial lotion. It was 34 bucks (decent for how much you get) and doesn’t have one ingredient I can’t understand. The product itself is an emulsifier, meaning it comes out somewhere between a foam, an oil and a liquid. ps- the company is Canadian!

I’ll let you know how it goes. I’m too vain to do before and after pictures but I promise you can take my word for it.

If you know of other products that could help calm/soothe my angry skin, please leave a comment. XO

UPDATE: I really love how this product smells and I can see a difference in redness. In terms of moisturizing though, I bought me some more trusty IMPRUV. It really is hands-down the best on the market and it is incred safe for your skin (not one harmful ingredient at all, whatsoever). Plus you can buy it at Shoppers (Optimum points!). So I’m using them in tandem and my skin looks and feels amazing.

If you don’t own Impruv yet, get it. Seriously.

"Help! They're coming - listen to me!"

An actor for the modern age, an engineer of the modern craft – of Kevin McCarthy and many like him we have to ask how many narratives and how many countless narrative jobs – from foley artists to animators – have been born of his relentless and durable performances. A thousand thanks, Maestro!

Posted by Jim Swift.

The surrealists André Breton and Paul Éluard used to enter movie theaters at random and stay only a little while, until the plot became clear to them and the films’ images were drained of their power. In the Cineplex you can do the same thing all in one building. I did that one day this summer. What I saw was not excerpts from ten different movies, but one movie made up of ten interchangeable parts—the imperial power of Hollywood, still alive and well, surviving postmodern fragmentation and resisting détournement.

Nicholas Rombes. A discovery. Impressionist with a chisel. Find the whole delirious journey here. Posted by Såladin and Owen. Thanks to Paul Sas via Tyler Cowen.

Thanks to Jean-Sebastien Monzani. Posted by Såladin & Jim Swift.

Posted by Såladin. Thanks to Jeff Larson.

Fifteen Seconds #1, #2, #3, #4, #5

"If you wanna kiss the sky, better learn how to kneel."

In what sphere of heaven will we one day find Jimmy Page in our revised Danté?

I say Sphere 7: Saturn, the contemplative.

Posted by Såladin, Jim Swift and John Owen.

A week ago the Los Angeles Conservancy showed the 1924 silent ‘Peter Pan’ at the beautifully restored Orpheum Theater as part of its ‘Last Remaining Seats’ program to benefit historic theaters in Los Angeles county. Robert Israel accompanied the film on the Orpheum’s ‘Mighty Wurlitzer’, tickling and pumping out the playful and evocative original score by Philip Carli – a score that included whistles, birdsong, Indian whoops and tom toms and had the 1926 pipe organ sounding very like a modern synthesizer, only in deep breathy analog and through a three-story forest of pipes.

As with all four of the major 20th century fairy tales written in English (The Wizard of Oz, The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars (1977) are the other three), ‘Peter Pan’ continues, a century into its life, to bubble up rivers of surprising narrative consciousness (my central hypothesis on this blog and elsewhere being that narrative – in all its conceits and devices – is to consciousness what syntax – in its parts of speech and grammar - is to language¹).

We’ll be visiting Peter Pan again and again in these pages, but for the moment I want to point out something new and revealing – it’s actually old by the standards of the tradition, but new to me and not in evidence in any of the versions of Peter Pan made after 1924.

Among the many doublings in the story and especially in the original stage play (two of the other conspicuous pairings [or perhaps parings], are Peter and his shadow and the traditional dual casting of George Darling and Captain Hook²), among these many doublings, the ticking time bomb of the Crocodile counting down the last hours and minutes of Hook’s life, it turns out, was always played on stage and again in the 1924 film version by the same actor who plays Nana, the Newfoundland in the nursery.

The actor was George Ali and his performance in both parts is that old cliché revived – a revelation; he’d been doing the roles on stage for two decades since ‘Peter Pan’ opened theatrically in London in 1904, and his exquisite pantomime alone is worth the price of admission and then some. But the revelation is to be had in the duality. As Nana he is all bashful tenderness, humbly warming Michael’s blanket at the grate and handling all of the Darling children as tenderly as a puss with her kittens. Yet there’s something terrifying in Nana’s hugely restrained delicacy too. Wild, animal energies are at their mute breaking point in Ali’s conception of the biggest breed on earth, abused by George Darling, ursine in tooth and claw, and left alone with three sweet-faced toddlers: I’ll eat you up, I love you so – indeed.

Now here’s where we get some real narrative and neuronal fireworks. Without doubling Nana later in the character of the crocodile, we’re forced in other versions of the story to suppress our uncanny terror of her by resorting to an access of sentimentality (loving Nana, in Salinger’s formulation, more than god could love her), and I would say again of the really great modern Fairy Tales – and this may be definitive of them: they are not sentimental; rather, they are uncanny, transcendent and transgressive. Ali’s performance in both parts makes sentimentality impossible and so restores the stakes Barrie must originally have had in mind. They make Nana dangerous. With her huge paws, massive muscular jaw and hesitant, passive-aggressive restraint (particularly against the hapless, interfering papa Darling), Ali is already telegraphing something of Nana’s reptilian future as Neverland’s Crocodile; and as the Crocodile – the most terrifying, relentless incarnation of any I’ve yet seen – there’s still some relic of goofy canine amiability in the performance (which naturally makes it worse). After all, wagging his great lizard’s head, he allows Peter to extract the enormous clock unharmed (after Peter half disappears, head and shoulders, into the dreadful maw). In this the Crocodile shows his own twisted restraint and a lustful aptitude for delayed gratification – though for different ends – it’s the meatier prize of Captain Hook he’s really after.

Slavoy Zizek in his marvelous ‘Pervert’s Guide to Cinema’, clarifies Freud regarding the knotted relationship of id and superego, pointing out that they are not at odds so much as they are in an obscene conspiracy against the ego – the superego stealing id energy to drive the prosecution, the id supplying an endless stream of grotesque and ridiculous witnesses for a jurist (picture the rectal judge in ‘The Wall’), who can never be satisfied. And while it may be more than we need say that by linking Nana and the Crocodile in one performer, we are given the story’s superego and id energies (and by proxy our own, while we’re in the tale’s thrall), it is very much worth allowing the split characterization to tell us something about the other dual characterization, and dual nature, of George Darling and Captain Hook.

The Darling’s nursery as directed by Herbert Brenon and photographed by the great James Wong Howe is a sensual, incestuous eden of the late Gilded Age. It is flouncy, albumenal, wet and warm. Mother’s kisses come delicate to the open lips of her ecstatic children and linger suggestively over their thrilled, open-eyed faces; nightly visits are made by an adolescent boy played by a young woman; all of the children seem on the brink of various sensual realizations; Wendy is pining for her first kiss – the ‘thimble’ (ahem), she never really gets. The innocence of the Darlings is redolent, baroque and fragile. And into this chamber occasionally stumbles the clumsy, cruel and conceited George Darling, always in street clothes where the others are in nightgowns. He has never been as absurd or brutish as he is here. An interloper and a trespasser, George is the real danger to the nursery’s fragile innocence, and it’s Nana who recognizes it. Nana who might otherwise have been George’s animal id, is instead his oppressive superego, an enormous insult to his patriarchy, and a humiliation to which the rest of the family is openly a party. And so George is at his most petty and ridiculous in his dealings with Nana, slyly putting his ‘medicine’ into her bowl (an act which will be doubled later, in another, more destructive reversal as poison for Tinkerbell – this time by Captain Hook), and eventually banishing her from the nursery altogether. Whereupon the younger Darlings are saved from him by Peter Pan.

Once in Neverland the roles are amplified and reversed. As the Captain, George Darling becomes openly fillicidal, a hook-handed, perverse child killer, seeking to destroy Peter and to deprive him of sexual experience by killing Tiger Lily, Tinkerbell and Wendy – all three, and to have his own sons as servants or marched off the plank to their deaths. He is pride, vanity and an obsessive lust for parental control unbound. Peter’s freedom, the innocence of the redskins and the lost boys, the blooming sensuality of the young women, all are a threat to him. This is George’s superego run amok, yet superego it is: the incarnation of Hook’s desires may be frightful, but his actions are luckless and impotent. He can make the law, but he cannot enforce it. He is, in fact, even less effectual than George Darling. Enforcing anything is left to his uncontrollable reptilian desires and the steady march of time.

And so we have the Crocodile and his clock (I told you I’d saved the best for last), a wonderful, modernist enjambment of earthly desires and cosmic forces, relentless and inescapable. The Crocodile shows us George Darling’s id energies run just as amok (and unsupervised), as Hook’s superego. The two must come together, sharing a matter anti-matter destiny. Once finally and fully sated, with Hook in his belly, the Crocodile sinks beneath the waves and disappears from the tale.

And amid all the conflagration, the really important question is – where are we? And here, I think, Barrie, through one of the great tales ever written, helps us to see what is most important about narrative art and story telling. Of course the ego at the center of all the whirling gyre is JM Barrie’s, and by the magic faerie dust of story and his great skill, it is also us. We are the tension – we provide it and exist in the ether of it – between all of these baroque and compounded doublings (and we’ve only just made a beginning with Nana, the Crocodile, George Darling and Captain Hook). Almost effortlessly we juggle them, move through them, climb their aggregate steps as on the face of a pre-Colombian temple to find ourselves solitary and clear-eyed at the summit. And in case you haven’t lately considered the actual importance of narrative art, and what it offers and affords the mind, consider this: as the id and superego (and a hundred other facets of consciousness), slug it out in this and many other of the great narratives and fairy-tales, the ego, the persona – the self – is given space, it is given room to breathe. It can exercise its muscles, consider its options. It can grow.

Narrative provides the microscopes and molecules for humanity’s best moral laboratory. It is here that the self – which has access to both the analytical abilities of the superego (we might as well transpose ‘pre-frontal cortex’ here), and the drive to action of the id (or the limbic system) – can work out the vagaries and varieties of its ethical motivations. In story after story, the ego, suspended in the primordial play of narrative, is freed from its usual constraints; freed to observe them in action; freed to enlarge the possibilities for finding balances and counterweights among all the doubles of the self; freed to develop more and more progressive and sophisticated ethical positions and to put them into action.

This is the job, and this is what great narratives and great fairy tales always avail us. It’s why Nabokov called Dickens’s stories fairy tales too, he meant it in the best sense (I think he hoped the same for his own carousels); he meant that in the midst of all the baroque menageries – Copperfield and Steerfroth, Ham and Heep, Micawber and Trotwood just as much as Pan and Hook, Wendy and Tinkerbell, Michael and the Mermaids – we are given a theater in which to more completely find our selves.

¹If, as Lacan had it, ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’, then by my estimation, consciousness is structured like a narrative.

²Though this, curiously, was not honored in the ’24 version and didn’t make its return to film until 2003.

Posted by Såladin. Special thanks to Kris Hrycun.

]]> http://narrativeartsblog.wordpress.com/2010/06/21/fifteen-seconds-5/ Mon, 21 Jun 2010 10:52:03 +0000 Narrative Arts http://narrativeartsblog.wordpress.com/2010/06/21/fifteen-seconds-5/

Fifteen Seconds #1, #2, #3, #4

Here’s an excerpt:

“…transmedia properties aren’t hatched overnight and require long-term planning both on the content creation and media/product rollout sides. So how can high standards of quality and consistency be maintained over an entire story world while constantly expanding it and adding new creators and content along the way? I’ve managed to distill the construction of a transmedia world into four key steps.

“* Prepare for multi-platform by expanding the story world

“* Maintain the IP with transmedia planning

“* Maximize value by assembling a franchise clearinghouse

“* Build brand equity by validating audience participation”

[Ed. To these solid guidelines, I would add:]

* Say goodbye to the three act screenplay, the 10k word short story, the five panel Sunday comic, the thirty minute sitcom, the radio show foley artist, and five act tragedy. Weave your narratives explicitly to match the spatial, temporal, enduring, transient, physical, digital, performative, architectural and design properties of the various media – collectively – that  you choose to present your ideas.

Read Jeff Gomez’s entire manifesto after the fold. Posted by Såladin. Thanks to Siobhan O’Flynn.

The entertainment industry at large has come to recognize that young adults and kids are consuming content voraciously, in ways not dreamt of even 10 years ago – they’re looking to follow the story surrounding a given property on as many mediums as possible, be it traditional TV, films, fan sites or related products. But to make a property truly work across the various platforms out there, the entertainment concept has to be conceived as bigger than any one medium and constructed with a sense of how each grand story arc will play out across each media touchpoint. Transmedia storytelling, as it’s become known, is really the art that’s driving this approach.

With the recent ratification of the Transmedia Producer credit by the Producers Guild of America, the announcement of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower as a concept that will run across a feature film trilogy and TV series, and Sony’s relaunch of Men in Black as a global cross-platform franchise, the age of transmedia storytelling seems to have truly arrived. Aspirational worlds and immersive universes are replacing consumer loyalties to movie stars and network television. Right now, the sharpest studios are planning from earliest development to build their tentpole and youth-targeted properties so their storylines will translate to an array of traditional and new media platforms, which has the potential to significantly enhance or even fundamentally change the relationship between intellectual property creators, owners and licensees.

Traditional licensing deals between property owner and manufacturer, more often than not result in books, video game adaptations or other consumer products that somehow recapitulate an element or image from the established story. T-shirts printed with logos or movie poster art, toy replicas and comic book series that deliver badly drawn versions of a movie IP or series’ beloved heroes are still all too common. However, transmedia properties are helping push this model into the next decade, arguably making consumer products and promotions integral parts of maintaining and expanding the story world that drives the IP.

Of course, transmedia properties aren’t hatched overnight and require long-term planning both on the content creation and media/product rollout sides. So how can high standards of quality and consistency be maintained over an entire story world while constantly expanding it and adding new creators and content along the way? I’ve managed to distill the construction of a transmedia world into four key steps.

* Prepare for multi-platform by expanding the story world

* Maintain the IP with transmedia planning

* Maximize value by assembling a franchise clearinghouse

* Build brand equity by validating audience participation

Expanding the story world

It all starts with getting a clear understanding of the property at hand. Who is your hero? Who is the villain? What is this fictional universe trying to say? You need to define the recurring themes, messages and archetypes that guide the central narrative of your property and describe the vision of the original creator. Take Spider-Man, for example. At its heart, the property revolves around teen superhero Peter Parker and the guilt he harbors because he let his uncle’s murderer get away. In short, it’s a story about a kid looking to do good in the world to make up for his past sin. Everything related to the property should stem from this vision, which can only be maintained by:

1. Making sure that the property’s essence is organically woven into its every iteration, no matter how seemingly minor (i.e. a mobile phone app, or even the description on a hangtag attached to a piece of apparel).

2. Explicitly and loyally observing the canon of the property’s fictional universe in all iterations (i.e. an event that takes place in the video game is referenced as having happened by characters in the movie, etc.).

Everything else stems from this. You have to uncover the unique elements of your story that make it resonate with the audience. Ask yourself the basic questions: What are you trying to say? Who are you trying to reach? What’s the appeal of the story? It’s simple stuff, really, but the vital importance of these details are often overlooked in their vital importance. Two dudes in robes, whacking each other with light sticks does not equal Star Wars. The theme that George Lucas infuses into each piece of the Star Wars story is the importance of finding peace within yourself before you can bring balance to your world. And it’s the presence of this theme that authenticates each new addition to the universe.

You must also create a story that alludes to a greater world within the fictional context. It’s got to be a place that feels real. It comes with rules and a history, culture and slang. It exists beyond the borders of the screen. If you’ve skipped ahead to asking how something like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles turned slime into a hot saleable commodity, you need to back up a second and ask why kids found it so cool to have that yucky slime in the first place. The quick answer is because it represented something in the story.

A fully realized story world doesn’t just make for a deeper narrative. It allows for the generation of hours and hours of quality content beyond the first presentation of the property. The main characters can have sidekicks who have histories that involve new adventures that take place in foreign lands populated by their own villains and steeped in specific legends. You see how quickly this works? It’s possible to constantly create new stories and characters, but be sure to lay the groundwork so that every new twist and turn in the story emerges organically and is infused with the brand essence.

Failure to build and then observe canon can produce an “anything goes” universe in which your stories (and those of your licensees) are loaded with contradictions, schisms and nonsense. Canon allows for stories to build the brand through a framework of logic and consistency, even if the story world is fantastical or cartoonish in nature. For any multi-platform implementation of narrative, canon is imperative.

Transmedia planning

There is a reason almost everybody has heard of Lucas, James Cameron and J.J. Abrams – they’ve successfully created franchises from concept to fruition and beyond, and then left the gates to their properties unlocked, so that teams of writers and artists can add wonderful bits to the franchise canon. Though most of these worlds are now stewarded by other producers or groups of producers, the groundwork carefully laid by their creators continues to flourish as their licensed universes expand.

These are the visionaries, the people who know the history of the property (both real and fictional) and understand its core. They’re the ones who know what the J. in Bartholomew J. Simpson stands for, what kind of kid he is, and why he is so important to Americans of a certain age. But they are also the type to know Homer is the true engine that drives The Simpsons. As far as creative is concerned, the buck stops with the visionary.

In recent months, studios have come to recognize that the responsibility for conveying this canon to various corporate divisions, sponsors and licensees can fall on the shoulders of a new player, the transmedia producer. Something of a dynamic bridge between the creative, product development and marketing teams, transmedia producers are either brought on as consultants or employed via an in-house position. Savvy to the elements of story, keen on the strengths and weaknesses of various media platforms, and sensitive to the politics and bureaucracies of corporate environments, these franchise stewards facilitate brand extension while preserving the soul of the brand.

Transmedia producers are often responsible for assembling a set of guidelines or a franchise bible, which can be distributed in confidence to all interested parties. Participants willing to do the extra work to generate an engaging and persistent transmedia story world are rewarded by the producer, often with key events or major story developments designed to drive audiences to their product. So everything is “in game,” it all counts, from the tags on T-shirts to the very last comic book.

Check out Star Trek: Countdown from licensee IDW Publishing, for example, which boasted all of the hallmarks of excellent transmedia execution. The 2009 feature film’s producers granted a boon to the comic book publisher by allowing the screenwriters to create a four-issue prequel story that cleverly bridged the classic Star Trek universe to the new one introduced in J.J. Abrams’ movie. This major piece of Trek lore helped soothe thousands of apprehensive Trekkies, who in turn primed the web with “thumbs up” blog entries and message board posts, and it sold like gangbusters as a trade paperback and iPhone digital comic.

Finally, transmedia producers participate in planning the franchise rollout. They help weave together story and medium, designating the launch platform and how its content will dovetail into that of the driving platform. Like orchestra conductors, they must coordinate how different parts of the story will act in concert, determining when to launch that video game prequel or when to activate those licensed chapter books.

Opening product channels

Once your franchise steward or transmedia producer is in place, creating new content with the aid of a core brand mythology – even as your in-house creators and licensees are expanding your franchise universe – how do you keep these stories in the same world? And how do you keep your stories from getting stale? The answers lie in the establishment of a franchise clearinghouse.

The steward of the property, once the work of producing content is underway, must enable a team to vet the content and products emanating from the driving platform to make sure they make sense in the established continuity. Equally important, the new, fresh elements that licensees and other authors add into the mix have to be parsed and integrated into the established mythology.

Each consumer touch point tells a bit of the story. Or at least it should. Why should a person buy something new if it’s just going to rehash something they’ve seen or heard before? With so many options to choose from in the media marketplace, these consumers will most likely move on to find a franchise that rewards their searches with new material. A task force, particularly in the case of larger firms, needs to be assembled for creative and strategic guidance.

Successful task forces at companies like Disney, Sony and Microsoft Game Studios allow for key members of each property team, department and division and related licensees to meet regularly (monthly in the early going, possibly weekly during the rundown to rollout or major events). These task forces submit and review editorial content, graphic designs and product development, exchange news and developments, disseminate information from the franchise visionary, incubate ideas for cross-promotion and support one another’s endeavors with shared assets and brainpower.

The steward or transmedia producer maintains a presence in these clearinghouses by helping to devise submission guidelines, allowing for new content to be expedited through the system and supervising a centralized and streamlined approval procedure.

Clearinghouses are also used for conflict resolution. Vast storylines generated by multiple factions for an array of media platforms are likely to raise contradictions. Systems are created for determining alternative solutions to creative disputes. Because the IP is positioned at the center and placed above corporate politics, task force members see the clearinghouse as an answer-oriented asset, rather than as a place where ideas go to die.

Finally, franchise clearinghouses allow for the maximization of story potential. Team members are encouraged to recommend or provide solutions that energize and revitalize stories, rather than stamp them into irrelevance. Content worthy of being an important addition to the canon of the story world is encouraged. Nothing slides under the radar and everything must count in a surprising and entertaining way.

Validate and celebrate

Who best to tell you what’s going right (and wrong) with a property than the fans themselves? In truth, they are the torchbearers, the ones who keep it going, even between major product releases. Providing the means for audience participation is integral to any successful transmedia implementation. In short, if you show audience members that you’re listening, provide them with a branded forum that invites personal and creative expression, and maybe even talk to them directly now and then, the results can be quite powerful.

Forums in which fans talk to creators? Active social media sites? These are essential to the survival of a modern franchise. Successful transmedia is signified by two-way communication. Children are growing up in a culture where creative tools are at their fingertips. We must embrace these impulses and ignore them at our peril. The ideas are endless, as are the possibilities. By asking fans what they want, everyone can get what they need – better stories and even better revenues.

Video by Arev Manoukian.

Shot with the Canon 7D, Canon EF 17-40mm f.4, Flat Picture Profile, 1/100 Shutter Speed.

Posted by Såladin. Thanks to Jeff Larson.

“In some books and some web entries (most recently, here and here and here and here), I’ve tried to trace the rich tradition of ensemble staging. From almost the start of cinema, filmmakers have explored creative ways of moving actors around the set, aiming at both engaging storytelling and pictorial impact. Since the 1960s, on the whole, this tradition has been waning. Now, I fear, it has nearly disappeared.

“I’m not going to reiterate those earlier arguments. [But you should study them. Ed.] Instead I want to talk about one simple staging tactic that directors almost never employ today. I offer it at no cost to young directors. Try it! You might get a taste for a range of cinematic expression that is nowadays neglected.”

I would add that the rapid modern movement of the camera – on picture cars, shot-makers, cranes, steadi-cams, dollys and handheld by the operator – which has done something to cloud the minds of directors regarding the movement of their actors, is no excuse not to move the actors too. A director, DP and operators should be thinking like choreographers and that means giving at least the potential for movement to everything in a scene.

Find David’s whole piece on crossing moves here.

Posted by Såladin.

And as if that wasn’t enough, the petit fours weren’t bad either…

Shot with the Canon 7D and the Canon 5D Mark II.

Posted by Såladin. Thanks to Jeff Larson.

"One through nine, no maybes, no supposes, no fractions."

Dennis Hopper was one of the great special effects in the modern era; our chemical man in the movies. But his loss reminds us that special effects continue to evolve as an honest performer’s most bitter competition – only occasionally inspiring them, and always at a price. And yet, like the best bare-knucklers, Hopper kept getting up and kept throwing punches even as the explosions got bigger, the colors coarser, and the fakery… well, shit – fakier. But what did it cost him, and what is it costing us?

Dennis Hopper was as internally combustible as the ‘Captain America’ and ‘Billy’ bikes in Easy Rider; he was every bit the pyrotechnical psychedelic to compliment the napalm plumage on the Nung beachhead and the light show over the Do Lung bridge in Apocalypse Now; he mingled among the vapors of his own invention in Blue Velvet; and was the most sopping wet of dry drunks in Hoosiers.

But whether he was any more human than the strictly chemical, gaseous, and now pixelist creations concocted by the whiz kids at Lightstorm, ILM and WETA is hard to say. In even his most memorable performances, Hopper was never a husband, never a father, never a best friend – certainly not a functional one. He was always more Richard Widmark than James Cagney. It’s just that Widmark’s era wouldn’t have known what to do with him. They didn’t have squibs and blood bags, animatronics, motion control or CGI.

They hadn’t even heard of napalm yet.

But we have. And until yesterday, we had Dennis Hopper to stand up in the jungle for us and give as good as he got.

Who will do it now?

Posted by Såladin and Jon Owen.

Shot with the Canon 7D 17-40mm f.4 at a high shutter speed (1/100) to pick up the flakes of parsley and all the fine droplets of blood and butter.

Posted by Såladin. Thanks to Jeff Larson.

See all the videos at Ozersky.tv/

Shot with the Canon 5D Mark II. 24-105 f4

Posted by Såladin. Thanks to Ben Leventhal, Laurie Pila and Jeff Larson.

“It has no boundary… It is a ribbon of dream.”

- On Cinema.

“Everyone will always owe him everything.” – Godard

We’re all filmmakers now, so we can finally ask ourselves what it is we all really owe Orson Welles. My own catalogue fills several notebooks, so I’ll mention just two of the indispensable lessons I’ve learned studying Welles’s films these last twenty odd years.

First, it’s possible to be baroque and commonplace at the same time – in both character and conceit. It’s a rare sensitivity that can marry the majestic and the mundane and find in each characteristics of the other. The dynamic is abundant in Shakespeare and Dickens; otherwise it’s a rarity, and it showed diminishing returns with the fade of romanticism toward the end of the Victorian era. Welles was the first (was he the only?), to show us that these extremes could live comfortably even among the various austere and internal modernist idioms of the twentieth century. Kafka’s particularly intricate banality, to point to one example, was called and raised in Welles cubist masterworld rendering of ‘The Trial’ – it’s an intuitive adaptation to set beside Kubrick’s Lolita.

Second, having spent his formative years in the theater, Welles always understood that the camera wasn’t a single perspective, or a single viewer, but that inside the theater of that black box, in row after row behind the ground glass, sat eight or nine hundred people. He used the camera accordingly, and in every shot Welles ever made he maintained that pronounced and affectionate awareness of his audience.

Both of these intuitive capacities go to matters of scale, an increasingly obvious sub-theme of this blog.

Posted by Såladin.

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