Manufacturing Dreams

Manufacturing Dreams from nocoastfilms on Vimeo.

“No other art-medium–neither painting nor poetry–can communicate the specific quality of the dream as well as the film can. When the lights go down in the cinema and this white shining point opens up for us, our gaze stops flitting hither and thither, settles and becomes quite steady. We just sit there, letting the images flow out over us. Our will ceases to function. We lose our ability to sort things out and fix them in their proper places. We’re drawn into a course of events–we’re participants in a dream. And manufacturing dreams, that’s a juicy business.” -Ingmar Bergman (Bergman on Bergman, 1973)

dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y

My friend Alex Provan has an interview with Johan Grimonprez in the interview issue of Bidoun.



dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y was part of the screening schedule for my senior seminar in documentary production, paired with One Day in September, and I loved it instantly. You should probably read Alex's interview, then watch both films.

Minimalist Realism, Showing What You See, & the Female Eye

Wendy & Lucy

dir. Kelly Reichardt, 2008

The portentous opening shots of trains in Wendy & Lucy leave no doubt exactly where Wendy Carroll (Michelle Williams) is headed, but the hour and twenty minutes we spend with her over the few days she spends in an unnamed Oregon town are no less entrancing.

(Un)necessary brief plot synopsis: A 20-something woman named Wendy is en route from Indiana with her dog Lucy in search of seasonal cannery work in Alaska. She's got short hair, wears a blue hoodie, western shirt & cut-off corduroy shorts, drives an '88 Honda Accord, and it breaks down in a town in Oregon. This is one of a few things that do not go well and leave a major dent in the sum at the bottom of the page in the meticulously kept notebook in which she tracks her dwindling finances.



Oh, the beauty of film! Shot on Super-16, Wendy & Lucy is full of impeccable colors, especially in forest scenes, gorgeously done night scenes full of all the grain that results from an optical blow-up to 35mm, and depth of field simply not possible on video.



As Lucy (played by Reichardt's dog) makes friends with a group of crust-punk types around a bonfire and Wendy follows to retrieve her, Reichardt's camera seems to become perspectival, focussing* from face to face as if Wendy is gauging trustworthiness. It is, in my mind, the fact that this is a female eye (lens) tracing the path of the female protagonist's eye that makes this scene work; were the camera to float away from the person speaking (a drifter played by Will Oldham) to other faces around the bonfire -- including lingering shots on the only other and very tough-looking female of the group -- without the distinct sense that we are engaged in the self-aware nature of Wendy's position as a solo female traveler, this would appear a sloppily edited sequence. In a far more dramatic echoing of the sense in this scene later in the film, I began to think that I had never seen such material shot in that manner before. There are simply so few women making films that it is hard to make a compelling case that the gaze of the female director is different, but this film makes solid strides in that direction.


Furthering its minimalism, the film eschews a score, opting instead for a repeated theme -- composed by Oldham and played slighlty amplified -- of Wendy humming. The overt pathos of dramatic orchestral elements would ruin the pain we feel, slowly & experientially, for Wendy's predicament. Reichardt lets moments happen. Birds fly by, high in the air, and it is clear from the focus-pulling that this was a shot taken because it just happened. It is downright beautiful.



Reichardt is a gifted, principled director. The full text of a fantastic interview done by Slant Magazine is worth the read. A professor at Bard College, she gives solid pushback when the interviewers begin asking questions about how her filmmaking might change with the onset of "success."

Slant: You've talked before about wanting to continue working at these sensationally low-budget levels. Isn't that something filmmakers tend to say and then disregard once they meet with a certain level of success?

KR: Well, what's your definition of success? I find that to be a fucking annoying question, I have to say.

Slant: Why is that?

KR: This constant implication that success has one picture is so limited—and talk about American! I'm constantly asked this, as if teaching is some loser profession, or an uninteresting place to be. I've been out in L.A. for five days with my film, just doing stuff that I've never done before, press junkets and stuff, and I'm like—this is it? This is what everybody thinks is the most special fucking thing on the planet? Are you kidding me? It melts your brain. It's really hard to stay small, actually. That I've been able to make these last two films without anybody paying any fucking attention and just go off and have complete artistic freedom—what are you gonna trade that for? What do you consider success, since you're asking me that question?

Slant: I think I was just suggesting that if you were to raise more, you'd probably spend it wisely. There's no discernable difference between the scale of your films and a Woody Allen film, but he can spend 20 million and the money buys access to more filmmaking tools and sought-after actors and so forth.

KR: Give me an example of a woman who can do that.

Slant: A woman who can insist on creative control and still raise 20 million?

KR: Yes.

Slant: I can't name any, but I have a reason why I can't.

KR: I have a reason too—there aren't any! Okay, forget about 20 million. Name a woman at the level of Gus Van Sant or Todd Haynes. Give me a female example of that.

Slant: Allison Anders. In 1996. I can't think of any on the spot, but in that category I know there are some.

KR: And she wasn't getting 20 million, by the way. She was living off a grant. Please. The idea that we're struggling to think of one that might have existed at some point—maybe that's why that question pisses me off. I'll also say that I can't think of a woman who has this benefit either: Lars von Trier and Terrence Malick can put out films and not have to go out and talk about them. If I want to think about what real success would be, it would be to be able to make a film without anyone breathing down my back and then not have to go out and talk about the film after you've gone to great lengths in your film to not over-explain everything. To not have to go out, that would be true success, but then you're just screwing over your distributor or your investors.

Amen.


*I read the New Yorker. This is the spelling they use. I like it. Deal.

Images from the film's press site

The Wire, auf Deutsch

I can't even imagine what this must be like to watch.  The chief dubber explains:

When one is otherwise paying attention to synchronization in dubbing, it’s a straight speech, that means no throaty voices, nasaly voices, “spuckeklacker” (stuttering/lisping). You really try and make sure this doesn’t happen or you simply don’t end up using these kind of takes. But in this series we’ve had to accept them. The slums, the ghettos, the on-the-street, that should come across as authentically as possible. That the people don’t manage to speak very clearly or nicely, they can do that too – I hold my nose a little now, here and there, speak more nasaly, sometimes stutter a bit, don’t speak so clearly, so that can come across.

In general it’s really hard to bring the slang over to German as it is in the original. I’m sure there’s been a lot of urban jargon in there, but you have to be careful about momentarily fashionable speech, because what’s common right now is at one point “in” speech – once dubbed, always dubbed. So when someone watches that in five or seven years, “in” speech spoken here on the street in Germany won’t be “in” anymore, or people simply don’t say things like that anymore. So one has to take care with those sorts of things.

To bring over the style of the speech out of the slums or ghettos, we haven’t used very exact, grammatically correct German. Nobody says “Wegen des Fahrrads” (because of the bikes), rather “wegen dem Fahrrads” (’cause of them bikes), for example there we use wrong German. Here and there we’ve used other phrases, sometimes with an English or American sentence structure.

TIE Retrospective, 2009

All you need for cinema to happen: A room with an audience, all facing the same direction, a source of light projecting above their heads, and darkness.

-Christopher May, director, TIE

There is a pause, space of black and silence, purposefully left between the short films. I describe to Jennie the need for a moment to clear the mind, come to the next piece fresh -- "like ginger & sushi," she retorts.

What follows are my notes and reactions to many of the films screened.

PROGRAM ONE

Necrology (Standish Lawder, 12 min, USA, 16mm, 1969-1970)
The only older piece of work in Program One of the show, Standish Lawder's motionless camera films people on an escalator, then projects this motion in reverse. The effect, of a flat mass of people ascending ad infinitum, brings to mind the Auffahrt (Ascension) -- countless souls in their own performative little worlds fleeting upwards on screen. At the end of the film, we are treated to a cast list full of imagined lives and ones constructed from what we see -- the secretary, menstruating, the man picking his nose, the Yalie, black. In this list of assignations, we are reminded of the projections we make onto others, strangers.

Dipping Sause (Luther Price, 10 min, USA, 16mm, 2005)
A series of Rube Goldberg devices propel the film toward varying torturous, fetishized conclusions.

Film for Invisible Ink, Case No. 142: Abbreviation for Dead Winter [Diminished by 1,794] (David Gatten, 13 min, USA, 16mm, 2007)
The screen is white. There are flecks, small variations in color, and the dust on the film is both evident and repetitive. Hair is focus-pulled. I ask Jennie if this is what winter in Nebraska is for her. She says it is, and like a kaleidoscope, only so much better.

July Fix (Jason Livingston, 3 min, USA 16mm, 2006)
How brilliant it is to take just small snippets of a pop song with appropriate pauses of silence -- we know to fill in the blank space, we do it automatically as the song is immediately in our head.

Nothing is over Nothing (Jonathan Schwartz, 16 min, USA/Israel, 16mm, 2008)
Toward the end, we see the eponymous shot, a stenciled bit of graffiti of Ahmadinejad sporting playboy bunny ears & bowtie with the words NOTHING IS OVER NOTHING just below. An Israeli solider stands next to the electrical box on which this is scrawled, posing for the camera. Schwartz's travelogue of Israel is full of blue -- from the opening shot of a blue door detailed with a Star of David in the foreground as a Hasid stands in the right half of the screen, slightly back to the mother in a blue denim dress holding a Russian Blue cat to the bathroom encrusted in blue tile, blue window panes to a man and a woman covered in mud at a spa to another stencil, this of an upside-down machine gun, done in a pale blue spray paint -- and this produces the effect of nearly convincing us the film has been tinted. Apparently, his camera was broken; he did not realize he was shooting in more than 24 frames per second. The effect of the all-encompassing slow motion is deeply profound, and it was quite striking to see it at this precise historical moment.

Sacred Space (David Chaim Cohen, 14 min, USA, 35mm, 2007)
Stan Brackhage revisited, not through technique but in effect, and ramped up on tactile, seemingly three-dimensional steroids. And to think this was a student film from CalArts, made on 35mm. Amazing, mesmerizing, and I never wanted it to end.

...
PROGRAM TWO

Dollar Portrait (Matthew Perino, 4:44 min, USA, 16mm, 2008, Silent)
In the positive and negative optical printing, parts of money begin to resemble sprocket holes.

Whirl (Scott Banning, 7:35 min, USA, 16mm, 2007)
Lights on an amusement park ride look so blue, they've never looked so blue or purple all at once before. Sometimes, in their close-ups, they begin to look like anglerfish, deep underwater. This was originally black & white film that was then transferred and edited digitally, then projected and the projection filmed. The tint emerges in the digital space between film stocks.

Wot the Ancient Sod (Diane Kitchen, 17 min, USA, 16mm, 2001, Silent)
This portrait of leaves is a reminder of the incredible possibilities of a shallow depth of field, something only film can achieve.

To Be Regained (Zach Iannazzi, 10 min, USA, 16mm, 2008)
One of a few films done by young, devoted filmmakers, this one a graduate of Amherst. It's impressive to see documentary work -- a medium that traditionally requires a much higher ratio of footage to finished length -- done all on film. Iannazzi does plenty of hand processing, adding lovely grit to the footage of his own he cuts together with stock footage of salmon being...de-egged?

Trauma Victim (Robert Todd, 17 min, USA, 16mm, 2002)
This collection of shots and scenes seems to come deep from within the psyche. As waterfalls are projected, I find it impossible to keep my eyes from tracking downward with the water. Like its waterfalls, it is a pouring out of brain space.

Errata (Alexander Stewart, 7 min, USA, 16mm, 2005, Silent)
Nothing so beautiful has ever been done with a photocopier. Ink soaks like blood through the projected image sequences.

Metaphysical Education (Thad Povey, 4 min, USA, 16mm, 2003)
Made with a homemade optical printer, frames seem to slide horizontally, revealing their soundtracks in the otherwise hidden margins, bright and beautiful.

...

Official Program Notes

TIE on the web

Auteur Theory

These two films (which I saw back to back the past two nights) struck me as prime examples of auteur theory. Take that for what it's worth.

Escape or Liberation?

GLASS: A portrait of Philip in twelve parts
dir. Scott Hicks, 2007



"Writing is an antidote to the chaos of the world around you." So said an unnamed writer, friend of Philip Glass. Philip muses, "Is art, then, escape or liberation? Is sanity also escape?" This, the end of Scott Hicks's documentary, neatly wraps together what has been a subtly presented portrait of Glass -- we are given no heavy-handed voice-over analysis here.

The chaos simmers below the surface in Glass's biography. By all appearances, he is a quiet, mild-mannered sort, questioning why Hicks would even want to film his process of making pizza at his retreat home in Nova Scotia. His young child breaks a glass, his wife panics a little, he continues his work. We are introduced to his childhood by his siblings, who, while sifting through old family photographs, talk about his personal ambition to attend the University of Chicago, graduate in three years, and then decide to go to Julliard. Photo archives of early work in New York brush on the radical nature of performances. We are privy to both the siblings and family friends making comments about "the wives."

Though Hicks goes so far as to subtitle his film "a portrait...in twelve parts," the labeling is a bit of a misnomer; the twelve parts are structural elements, places for title cards. This is a quite organically made film, as it is clear Hicks and his sound recordist spent a good deal of time embedded, as it were, with Glass, his family, and his professional associates. It seems as though Hicks perhaps needed the structure of twelve themes as a schematic for organizing his footage. For the viewer, however, many of the segments blend into one another, return to common places or voices. Others branch into different directions, providing new voices to the greater narrative. Not only is the filmmaking itself very honest, but we as viewers are actually privy to this through the editing of the film. We occasionally hear Hicks asking a question, and, at a particularly poignant moment in the film, an interview is interrupted, the camera must adjust, the boom mic enters the shot, the shot continues, the camera then readjusts, refocuses, and the interview resumes.
At another point, Glass receives and ignores a cell phone call in the middle of being interviewed. He has been discussing his latest work -- an opera entitled "Waiting for the Barbarians" -- and the theme from the end has been playing in the soundtrack. It drops away as Glass takes the call, and after he jokes with Hicks about not wanting to talk to the person calling, he returns to his point about the opera. The music slowly fades back up.

A slicker documentarian would edit this all out, and we would be far the worse for it as an audience. At face value, Glass's biography is far less nuanced; after all, he was a smart child who became a successful student who studied under some top-tier musicians and has since become a well-respected composer. There is some drama, some tragedy, but this is a more private man than that. His controversy, publicly, has been his art.

Unlike many "portraits of an artist," GLASS does not dwell on the details of this artist's process. We see Glass working in different venues, and we begin to gain an understanding of his practice through interviews with his wife and his colleagues, among them Errol Morris and Woody Allen.

For Glass, art is life -- as he says, "I don't think of a piece of music, think of what I'm going to write, I hear it." A little precious, yes, but this is Philip Glass, after all.

"Music is listening.
Drawing is seeing.
Dancing is moving.
And poetry is speaking."

NB: As I left the film theater, crowds of well-dressed, mostly middle-aged and older folks were streaming into the Rococo for a lecture by Ken Burns. That would have been a different kind of documentary, indeed.

Encounters at the End of the World

Werner Herzog dedicates his latest film, Encounters at the End of the World, to Roger Ebert -- a film about Antarctica that is not another film about penguins. At one point, however, the question of whether insanity might exist in the penguin world is raised of a long-time penguin researcher. The answer? Footage, accompanied by Herzog's voiceover, of a lone penguin heading not toward the sea nor the breeding grounds, but straight for the mountains and "to a certain death."


All researchers on Antarctica must go through a two-day survival training before being left off the American military base. To simulate white-out blizzard conditions, they wear buckets on their heads as they attempt to "rescue" their trainer, gone missing in a trip to the outhouse.



The underwater footage is stunning, as it is amazing to imagine anything living in water that measures -2℃. Recordings of seals provide the soundtrack, described by one researcher as reminiscent of Pink Floyd.


Encounters at the End of the World, full of the markers of Herzog's own cinematic code, gives a sense of besting David Attenborough at his own game. Herzog travels to a tremendous, alien place and examines its inhabitants with resplendent narration, twisting the trope of nature documentary, this time, by documenting the scientists.

The Wanderings of My Subconscious

or The Kale Birther, A Crowded Train to New York and Chicago, The Hectograph, and The Predator

I imagined a woman who doesn't want a baby, births kale instead. I climbed over the heads of people on an aisle-less train, trying to get my bags. The hectograph churned in the background. The Predator enveloped everything below me it its being, scaring me awake.



I've realized I really like the tone bed that is This American Life, more than I necessarily like the content of the shows. I am, of course, always quite enthralled with dedicated listening, but I'm aware also that the sound of the show gives me the same sense of relaxation, even if I'm not paying attention.

The film world is abuzz with mumbles, as mumblecore reaches the pages of the NY Times and others with the debut of Hannah Takes The Stairs. This is the defining film movement of my generation, eh?

Zizek in a new film

Slavoj Zizek, certainly one of the most fun film theorists to read -- if you're into that kind of thing -- has become a movie star himself once again, this time in a film by Sophie Fiennes. It's called The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, and focuses heavily on the psychosexual fantasy world with which the cinema is so imbued. Fiennes apparently has managed to insert Zizek into scenes from several films to critique them as they play. What decadent fun!

Unfortunately, it's playing at the MoMA, not just any theater near you.