Monday, May 24, 2004
Sunday, May 23, 2004
Friday, May 21, 2004
How do you distinguish between compassion and pity? Is it connected to a perceived difference between noble suffering and ignoble suffering?
(In a Utopian novel I once read, the author claimed that all suffering is ignoble and debases human dignity. That strikes me as an immensely foolish thing to say. Draw the proper conclusions from those premises and you might find the hidden despair of the progressive reformer.)
(In a Utopian novel I once read, the author claimed that all suffering is ignoble and debases human dignity. That strikes me as an immensely foolish thing to say. Draw the proper conclusions from those premises and you might find the hidden despair of the progressive reformer.)
David Edelstein on the original Japanese version of my beloved Godzilla, Gojira:
Edelstein, as always, does a nice job of capturing the essence of the film. The later Godzilla movies, such as the battles with Mothra and King Kong, are a bit silly but great fun, they exult in the pleasure of destruction. I always found the original, even the butchered American version, a bit too dark and slow for the 10 year old me. Looking back on it, I think I couldn't relate to the film's pathos.
The long section of Gojira—nearly 15 minutes—in which the monster destroys much of Tokyo is like nothing in any science-fiction film before or since. In the American cut, there are frequent inserts of Burr, yakking away on his mike as he narrates the creature's comings and goings. The original, though, is nearly wordless. There is a Japanese TV announcer: He watches the devastation from a high tower; wonders, "Has the world been sent back two million years?"; and has time to report on his own death as Gojira moves toward his tower, closing with an earnest, "Sayonara." Elsewhere, a mother leans against a wall and whispers to her little daughter, "We'll be joining your daddy soon. Just a little longer." It's the last minute or two that is the most harrowing. The music stops, and in the silence Gojira walks between the broken buildings, the cityscape behind him aglow, seeming to contemplate his handiwork.
Edelstein, as always, does a nice job of capturing the essence of the film. The later Godzilla movies, such as the battles with Mothra and King Kong, are a bit silly but great fun, they exult in the pleasure of destruction. I always found the original, even the butchered American version, a bit too dark and slow for the 10 year old me. Looking back on it, I think I couldn't relate to the film's pathos.
Exciting article on Asian cinema at Cannes by A.O. Scott in the New York Times. Also contains the first review of 2046!
Friday, May 14, 2004
What Time is it There?
Sergei Eisenstein theorized that the meaning of cinema as an art form lay in the use of montage. The juxtaposition of image A with image B to create a separate, and singular, effect. Films are built around the idea that the images they contain relate to one another to create new meanings. If a character looks in a certain direction, and the movie cuts to a different image, the audience assumes that the new image is what the character is looking at. Classical Hollywood editing works in this way; the story or the characters dictate the nature and timing of the cuts. With the exception of the dramatic close-up, very rarely will you see a typical dialogue scene in a classic Hollywood film cut into more shots than is absolutely necessary.
Modern filmmaking is often identified with a break from this type of editing. Watch Godard's Breathless, for example, and you will notice that the camera seems to have a mind of its own. The editing follows its own rules and calls attention to itself as editing (Godard always wants to put himself into the viewers mind). The use of the "jump cut" (where the film cuts ahead in time on the same image so that the actors seem to jump ahead), for example, is an obvious intentional break with classical editing rules. Due mainly to Godard and his French cohorts, this theory of cinema, the idea that in montage lays the meaning of the art form, represents the dominant strain of filmmaking today (just watch a standard action film). Hitchcock's Psycho, and that film's murder scenes, perhaps places this style of editing into mainstream entertainment for the first time.
There is, however, another way of editing that I identify with the film critic and theorist Andre Bazin. Bazin called Citizen Kane the greatest film ever made due Orson Welles' use of deep focus photography, a method that allows the audience to find meaning within the image because both the foreground and background are in focus. Kane's long takes and deep focus, then, open up a cinematic world that is more concerned with a kind of phenomenological take on reality, a belief that the camera can capture a kind of existential truth. Rather that create meaning, the artist of the long take seeks to record it.
One of the greatest proponents of this style, which I like to call anti-montage or long-take style, is Andrei Tarkovsky. A Tarkovksy shot can last so long you go past boredom into something else--in a way you have to learn to watch his movies in a new way. As a style it seems to have been most at home in the Asian cinema of Mizoguchi and Ozu, while in the west Tarkovsky, Bresson, and a few others, always in the minority, carried on the style. For recent examples check out Gus Van Sant's Gerry, or the films of Bela Tarr (good luck finding them!)
There is a shot in Tarr's film, Satantango, that pretty much sums up the power of the long take: a early morning shot of a window from inside a house. After a few minutes of staring at a seemingly static image, I grew restless, but soon I noticed the curtains were swaying from a draft in the house, and eventually I was startled to realize the sun was coming up! This kind of moment, almost a magnification of ordinary experience and a force for changing the way we see the world, is the magic moment that the long take strives for.
What Time is it There? is a gorgeous film in the anti-montage tradition. The shots usually last anywhere from 30 seconds to a few minutes (one shot even includes, as a joke I suspect, a clock in the background). It's an almost oppressively sad film, but there is a gentleness too, a slight and weary comical take on existence, that makes it a worthwhile film, maybe even a transcendent one.
Sergei Eisenstein theorized that the meaning of cinema as an art form lay in the use of montage. The juxtaposition of image A with image B to create a separate, and singular, effect. Films are built around the idea that the images they contain relate to one another to create new meanings. If a character looks in a certain direction, and the movie cuts to a different image, the audience assumes that the new image is what the character is looking at. Classical Hollywood editing works in this way; the story or the characters dictate the nature and timing of the cuts. With the exception of the dramatic close-up, very rarely will you see a typical dialogue scene in a classic Hollywood film cut into more shots than is absolutely necessary.
Modern filmmaking is often identified with a break from this type of editing. Watch Godard's Breathless, for example, and you will notice that the camera seems to have a mind of its own. The editing follows its own rules and calls attention to itself as editing (Godard always wants to put himself into the viewers mind). The use of the "jump cut" (where the film cuts ahead in time on the same image so that the actors seem to jump ahead), for example, is an obvious intentional break with classical editing rules. Due mainly to Godard and his French cohorts, this theory of cinema, the idea that in montage lays the meaning of the art form, represents the dominant strain of filmmaking today (just watch a standard action film). Hitchcock's Psycho, and that film's murder scenes, perhaps places this style of editing into mainstream entertainment for the first time.
There is, however, another way of editing that I identify with the film critic and theorist Andre Bazin. Bazin called Citizen Kane the greatest film ever made due Orson Welles' use of deep focus photography, a method that allows the audience to find meaning within the image because both the foreground and background are in focus. Kane's long takes and deep focus, then, open up a cinematic world that is more concerned with a kind of phenomenological take on reality, a belief that the camera can capture a kind of existential truth. Rather that create meaning, the artist of the long take seeks to record it.
One of the greatest proponents of this style, which I like to call anti-montage or long-take style, is Andrei Tarkovsky. A Tarkovksy shot can last so long you go past boredom into something else--in a way you have to learn to watch his movies in a new way. As a style it seems to have been most at home in the Asian cinema of Mizoguchi and Ozu, while in the west Tarkovsky, Bresson, and a few others, always in the minority, carried on the style. For recent examples check out Gus Van Sant's Gerry, or the films of Bela Tarr (good luck finding them!)
There is a shot in Tarr's film, Satantango, that pretty much sums up the power of the long take: a early morning shot of a window from inside a house. After a few minutes of staring at a seemingly static image, I grew restless, but soon I noticed the curtains were swaying from a draft in the house, and eventually I was startled to realize the sun was coming up! This kind of moment, almost a magnification of ordinary experience and a force for changing the way we see the world, is the magic moment that the long take strives for.
What Time is it There? is a gorgeous film in the anti-montage tradition. The shots usually last anywhere from 30 seconds to a few minutes (one shot even includes, as a joke I suspect, a clock in the background). It's an almost oppressively sad film, but there is a gentleness too, a slight and weary comical take on existence, that makes it a worthwhile film, maybe even a transcendent one.
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
2046
I just had to put up this picture from Wong Kar-Wai's new film 2046, soon to premiere at Cannes. It's probably one of the most anticipated films ever, and no one knows if it will be a masterpiece or a disaster. It will certainly be beautiful though. (That's Chinese pop-star Faye Wong in the picture--she is also in Wong's Chungking Express. I just bought one of her albums so I will let you know if it's good! I have an mp3 and she has a great voice. Mandarin Chinese is a beautiful language to hear, unlike Japanese, which can sound a bit rough.)
It's also worth noting that 2046 is a sequel of sorts to the great great In the Mood for Love, probably one of my top 5 films ever.
I just had to put up this picture from Wong Kar-Wai's new film 2046, soon to premiere at Cannes. It's probably one of the most anticipated films ever, and no one knows if it will be a masterpiece or a disaster. It will certainly be beautiful though. (That's Chinese pop-star Faye Wong in the picture--she is also in Wong's Chungking Express. I just bought one of her albums so I will let you know if it's good! I have an mp3 and she has a great voice. Mandarin Chinese is a beautiful language to hear, unlike Japanese, which can sound a bit rough.)
It's also worth noting that 2046 is a sequel of sorts to the great great In the Mood for Love, probably one of my top 5 films ever.
Thursday, May 06, 2004
OOIOO - "Mountain Book" from the album Green & Gold
Someone once said of Can that it was the sound of the sons of Nazis trying, and failing, to play rock and roll. Their attempt to appropriate American music, however, produced something new and unique, and something distinctly German. Much like the Germans, the Japanese have appropriated Western pop music for their own ends, and in the process have created a hybrid something that, to these Western ears, is endlessly fascinating. The sound of Western pop music put through an interpretive process perhaps not unlike that of English to Japanese back to English, creates a similar kind of wacky poetry.
This particular example comes from OOIOO, a side project of Yoshimi P-We of the Boredoms. OOIOO are basically a more glossy, neon-glow version of the Boredoms, with Yoshimi's unique sense of melody and rhythm always up front. The song consists of a simple but profoundly beautiful melody sung by at least two (probably more) women over and over. At first behind the melody, but eventually up front, and finally drowning out the melody altogether, is the rhythm section, a seemingly chaotic but sweetly textured melange of sounds that only slowly and after several listens gives way to any sense of order in the ear of the listener.
The structure and design of the song is similar to Miles Davis' Nefertiti. That piece begins with Davis' trumpet and Wayne Shorter's sax playing a similarly beautiful melody. If I knew more about music I could probably describe how the melodies work in almost the exact same way--but the most important thing is that they are both circular (there's no logical stopping point, it just goes on and on). On Nefertiti the melody is offset with the clattering and yet somehow muscular drumming of Tony Williams. Since Williams would never be content to fade to the background of a song anyway, one can imagine Miles having this idea while listening to him splatter his drums all over his other performances. Both songs make the rhythm the changing and evolving section of the music, while the melody, so to speak, keeps the rhythm.
The effect of switching the melody and the rhthym section is, ironically, a new kind of emphasis on the melody. It is constantly alienated from the listener, and, in both pieces, at times obscured all together to eventually achieve a kind of repetitive sublime.
Someone once said of Can that it was the sound of the sons of Nazis trying, and failing, to play rock and roll. Their attempt to appropriate American music, however, produced something new and unique, and something distinctly German. Much like the Germans, the Japanese have appropriated Western pop music for their own ends, and in the process have created a hybrid something that, to these Western ears, is endlessly fascinating. The sound of Western pop music put through an interpretive process perhaps not unlike that of English to Japanese back to English, creates a similar kind of wacky poetry.
This particular example comes from OOIOO, a side project of Yoshimi P-We of the Boredoms. OOIOO are basically a more glossy, neon-glow version of the Boredoms, with Yoshimi's unique sense of melody and rhythm always up front. The song consists of a simple but profoundly beautiful melody sung by at least two (probably more) women over and over. At first behind the melody, but eventually up front, and finally drowning out the melody altogether, is the rhythm section, a seemingly chaotic but sweetly textured melange of sounds that only slowly and after several listens gives way to any sense of order in the ear of the listener.
The structure and design of the song is similar to Miles Davis' Nefertiti. That piece begins with Davis' trumpet and Wayne Shorter's sax playing a similarly beautiful melody. If I knew more about music I could probably describe how the melodies work in almost the exact same way--but the most important thing is that they are both circular (there's no logical stopping point, it just goes on and on). On Nefertiti the melody is offset with the clattering and yet somehow muscular drumming of Tony Williams. Since Williams would never be content to fade to the background of a song anyway, one can imagine Miles having this idea while listening to him splatter his drums all over his other performances. Both songs make the rhythm the changing and evolving section of the music, while the melody, so to speak, keeps the rhythm.
The effect of switching the melody and the rhthym section is, ironically, a new kind of emphasis on the melody. It is constantly alienated from the listener, and, in both pieces, at times obscured all together to eventually achieve a kind of repetitive sublime.
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