Twilight tulips iridescence.
I have not read the books nor seen the film yet (will do so on the morrow). I love Kristen Stewart, so I won't be in the cinematic experience for quality or life-shattering wisdoms. Speaking of which, I absolutely adore Pete Vonder Haar's review of the film.
I have to give a couple of excerpts some attention. Pete remarks:
With his yearning eyes and tortured past, Edward is the romantic ideal for most 13-year old girls (and some boys): he’s androgynously gorgeous, has a dope ride, and doesn’t want to do anything but talk about your feelings and snuggle. It would appear that in addition to robbing his brood of their need for blood, Carlisle also removed their balls.
Indeed. The Byronesque Brooder is the object of many an adolescent girl's lust and adoration.
This quaint fantasy of the boy putting the brakes on would never fly in a traditional romance, hence the “vampire” angle, and the first half of the movie is devoted almost exclusively to the pair’s budding courtship. Unfortunately, this translates into scene after scene of Bella and Edward gazing longingly at each other – in the forest, up a tree, beside the cold and lonely sea – before any real tension develops.
Not everyone wants a traditional romance. Aside from the debate surrounding the efficacy of the abstinence-only approach to sex and sexuality education, why must all hormonally driven youths become sexually active? Is there still nothing equally or more satisfying to do when two people really like each other?
Furthermore, only in films do sparks between two individuals lead to the expression of that attraction a montage or two after sparks are depicted (or by the end of the film if a romantic comedy is involved). In real life, some people only have eye contact, smiles, and silently acknowledged mutual attraction (intellectual, emotional, physical, all of the above, or some other combination) because neither person wants to make a move...out of fear or paranoia or, in the words of Andrew Marvell, a bond that is "the conjunction of the mind but the opposition of the stars".
They're taken already.
The message is clear: don’t inconvenience that handsome boy who was so gallant in resisting your base urges by also straying beyond the boundaries of domestic complacency.
In other words: a female can have a male who profoundly loves her and will not impose his pro-creative instincts on her but if, and only if, she effectively erases her own sense of self and exists only for his well-being.
Oui ou non.
Definitely, bollocks to the patriarchy.
Showing posts with label film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label film. Show all posts
Friday, November 21, 2008
Monday, February 25, 2008
And the Golden Statuette Goes to...
Last night was the 80th Annual Academy Awards; I am so happy that Tilda Swinton won for Best Supporting Actress, Javier Bardem for Best Supporting Actor, Daniel Day-Lewis for Best Actor, and No Country For Old Men for Best Director and Best Picture.
Read more about the ceremony here.
Click here for photos.
Read more about the ceremony here.
Click here for photos.
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned...
so expressed by William Congreve in his play "The Mourning Bride."
I was browsing Amazon.com when I came across this book written by University of Vermont professor Hilary Neroni. It's called The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative, And Violence In Contemporary American Cinema.
While debating if I should get this book, I did some searching and came across and interview and a book review. The interview is really neat; I'm xeroxing most of it:
INTERview: Hilary Neroni
The author of The Violent Woman discusses film and fur
By Amanda Waite
Article published June 23, 2005
Hilary Neroni, professor of film and television studies, met with the view on June 17 to discuss her new book, The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative, and Violence in Contemporary American Cinema (SUNY Press), which explores the recent emergence of violent female characters in mainstream productions. Previously confined to particular genres and historical situations, the violent woman can now be found across genres in contemporary film. The trend began with the release of Thelma and Louise, the 1991 film about two women who run from the law after killing a man who tries to rape one of them. The film sparked a public debate about violent women — a reaction, Neroni says, that mirrors the hysterical public response to real female murderers like Lizzie Borden and Susan Smith. In her book, Neroni explores the disruptive quality of the violent woman, paying particular attention to how the narrative of the film itself is affected by the presence of these traumatic characters.
What is it about violent women in film that inspires you to study the phenomenon?
I think that the reason I was drawn to talking about the violent woman is because she’s an extreme of the strong woman. You could do a similar study of strong, dramatic, women characters in film, but I think that the physicality of violence makes a nice extreme example that shines a very bright light on all these machinations of the ideological workings of masculinity and femininity and how very strongly ideology and Hollywood needs (masculinity and femininity) to be complimentary… Also, I was very fascinated how historically, until this moment, the violent woman had been confined to particular genres and was linked to historical moments of crisis and tension between genders that have been very well documented by theorists and historians, like after World War II or during and after the suffragette movement in the teens.
In your book, you discuss violent women as traumatic and show how films depicting violent women frequently attempt to heal that trauma by forcing women back into more familiar gender roles or by splitting the woman’s violence from her femininity. What do you think this reveals about the status of women in society today?
I tend to look at Hollywood films as the workings of contemporary ideology. There are trends going on socially, and Hollywood is reacting to those trends. Because it’s mainstream and it’s part of ideology, it at times works to contain those trends. But sometimes, by accident or not, it ends up celebrating a trend. I think that it’s not always a one-to-one indication of exactly what’s going on, but it’s an interesting indication of tension and angst. These days, it would be hard to imagine an action film in which a woman doesn’t do something to help the hero, whereas in the 80s, even the first Terminator film, it was very common to have the woman just along; she’s not someone who would help out. Today, I think every audience member starts to be frustrated if a woman is just hanging out — if someone’s in trouble and there’s a gun lying there and she doesn’t pick it up. It’s interesting to see how our expectations have changed. I think film is an important place to look at in terms of what’s happening in society. Gender roles are changing, and the movies are dealing with it in their own way.
Your book offers analyses of the violent female characters in Thelma and Louise, The Long Kiss Goodnight, G.I. Jane, Courage Under Fire and Tomorrow Never Dies, among other films. Are there any films that have been released since you sent the book to press that you would have liked to have written about?
Well, Mr. and Mrs. Smith just came out, and that would have been a great one to talk about…and then there’s Kill Bill, which I have in a couple of footnotes in the book, but I would have liked to talk about that further. Million Dollar Baby, which I was kind of mad at. Three quarters of the way through the film — one of the only mainstream, big blockbuster films with a woman boxer in it — she becomes a complete quadriplegic! You’ve got to be kidding me! Those films would have been fun to talk about, but that’s one of the things about a book like this one when it’s on a topic that clearly keeps going; the films keep going.
It must be rewarding to see that your work is still relevant…
I just keep waiting for mainstream Hollywood to prove me wrong! But it doesn’t.
Moving from the specific to the general, why do you think it is important to study film?
We walk around in our day, and everything presents on a screen. Our computer screens, our iPods, our telephones often, and then we watch television or go see a movie. Our days are so drenched in screens, so I think it’s essential for students to study film and television and be able to analyze video games and internet and film and television as texts and be analytical about the way in which ideology and society is working within these texts rather than just consuming them as entertainment. I think it’s the essential thing to study. It’s our contemporary existence.
Source: UVM publication
To read a book review, click here.
Originally posted at Sthemingway.
I was browsing Amazon.com when I came across this book written by University of Vermont professor Hilary Neroni. It's called The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative, And Violence In Contemporary American Cinema.
While debating if I should get this book, I did some searching and came across and interview and a book review. The interview is really neat; I'm xeroxing most of it:
INTERview: Hilary Neroni
The author of The Violent Woman discusses film and fur
By Amanda Waite
Article published June 23, 2005
Hilary Neroni, professor of film and television studies, met with the view on June 17 to discuss her new book, The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative, and Violence in Contemporary American Cinema (SUNY Press), which explores the recent emergence of violent female characters in mainstream productions. Previously confined to particular genres and historical situations, the violent woman can now be found across genres in contemporary film. The trend began with the release of Thelma and Louise, the 1991 film about two women who run from the law after killing a man who tries to rape one of them. The film sparked a public debate about violent women — a reaction, Neroni says, that mirrors the hysterical public response to real female murderers like Lizzie Borden and Susan Smith. In her book, Neroni explores the disruptive quality of the violent woman, paying particular attention to how the narrative of the film itself is affected by the presence of these traumatic characters.
What is it about violent women in film that inspires you to study the phenomenon?
I think that the reason I was drawn to talking about the violent woman is because she’s an extreme of the strong woman. You could do a similar study of strong, dramatic, women characters in film, but I think that the physicality of violence makes a nice extreme example that shines a very bright light on all these machinations of the ideological workings of masculinity and femininity and how very strongly ideology and Hollywood needs (masculinity and femininity) to be complimentary… Also, I was very fascinated how historically, until this moment, the violent woman had been confined to particular genres and was linked to historical moments of crisis and tension between genders that have been very well documented by theorists and historians, like after World War II or during and after the suffragette movement in the teens.
In your book, you discuss violent women as traumatic and show how films depicting violent women frequently attempt to heal that trauma by forcing women back into more familiar gender roles or by splitting the woman’s violence from her femininity. What do you think this reveals about the status of women in society today?
I tend to look at Hollywood films as the workings of contemporary ideology. There are trends going on socially, and Hollywood is reacting to those trends. Because it’s mainstream and it’s part of ideology, it at times works to contain those trends. But sometimes, by accident or not, it ends up celebrating a trend. I think that it’s not always a one-to-one indication of exactly what’s going on, but it’s an interesting indication of tension and angst. These days, it would be hard to imagine an action film in which a woman doesn’t do something to help the hero, whereas in the 80s, even the first Terminator film, it was very common to have the woman just along; she’s not someone who would help out. Today, I think every audience member starts to be frustrated if a woman is just hanging out — if someone’s in trouble and there’s a gun lying there and she doesn’t pick it up. It’s interesting to see how our expectations have changed. I think film is an important place to look at in terms of what’s happening in society. Gender roles are changing, and the movies are dealing with it in their own way.
Your book offers analyses of the violent female characters in Thelma and Louise, The Long Kiss Goodnight, G.I. Jane, Courage Under Fire and Tomorrow Never Dies, among other films. Are there any films that have been released since you sent the book to press that you would have liked to have written about?
Well, Mr. and Mrs. Smith just came out, and that would have been a great one to talk about…and then there’s Kill Bill, which I have in a couple of footnotes in the book, but I would have liked to talk about that further. Million Dollar Baby, which I was kind of mad at. Three quarters of the way through the film — one of the only mainstream, big blockbuster films with a woman boxer in it — she becomes a complete quadriplegic! You’ve got to be kidding me! Those films would have been fun to talk about, but that’s one of the things about a book like this one when it’s on a topic that clearly keeps going; the films keep going.
It must be rewarding to see that your work is still relevant…
I just keep waiting for mainstream Hollywood to prove me wrong! But it doesn’t.
Moving from the specific to the general, why do you think it is important to study film?
We walk around in our day, and everything presents on a screen. Our computer screens, our iPods, our telephones often, and then we watch television or go see a movie. Our days are so drenched in screens, so I think it’s essential for students to study film and television and be able to analyze video games and internet and film and television as texts and be analytical about the way in which ideology and society is working within these texts rather than just consuming them as entertainment. I think it’s the essential thing to study. It’s our contemporary existence.
Source: UVM publication
To read a book review, click here.
Originally posted at Sthemingway.
Saturday, December 8, 2007
I Have No Desire to Be Kissed By You or Anyone Else
Jo Stockton (Audrey Hepburn) spoke those words to Dick Avery (Fred Astaire) seconds after he kissed her in the bookstore where she worked in Stanley Donen's 1957 musical Funny Face. He replied with, "Don't be silly. Everybody wants to be kissed--even philosophers."
Shortly after he leaves the store, she sings "How Long Has This Been Going On?"
Jo muses, "I was taught that I ought not expose my inner senses. Had no plan for a man, I was full of self-defenses. Now I feel that I really must face the consequences. My philosophic search, has left me in a lurch. I must find why my mind is behaving like a dancer. What's the clue to pursue for I have to have the answer? I could cry salty tears, where have I been all these years? How long has this been going on?"
In other words, Jo's intellectual pursuits have somehow side-tracked her interest in or perception of physical intimacy. For the normative audience, for people who subscribe to the dominant fiction (house, wife, two kids, half a dog), which is the majority of society, wanting to be kissed, held, caressed, and deflowered is about as natural as breathing and as expected as the aspirations to change the world. True, not everyone believes in marriage or has any conscious aim to find a spouse (even own a house, have the kids, or half a dog), but most of these people still crave that kiss, touch, and passion--love as expressed through physical intimacy (or in some cases physical intimacy without any emotional investment).
Nonetheless, there are individuals living amongst the normative-loving citizens who desire one but not the other or neither. They still want emotional closeness but have no interest in the joining of two bodies such that reproduction might occur if precautions are not taken. Or, they crave neither emotional nor physical bonding. Solitary creatures to the core.
Preferring to be alone isn't a problem. It's not that uncommon (observations across various discussion boards across the internet), but it goes against the dominant fiction. Loners tend to be romanticized in narratives that involve mysterious, tall, dark, and handsome strangers or the gunfighter heroes of the Old West.
Sociologically speaking, it makes sense that society's members agree upon what is right and what is wrong. A concept of courtesy, consideration, and that stealing and killing is wrong (and illegal) is designed to provide structure and monitor human behavior. Believing that certain kinds of killing is more acceptable than others (due to context or parties involved) is fine. We have to support this view, otherwise killing in self-defense would mean absolutely nothing in a court of law (not to mention what occurs during war times and sting operations).
Anyone who strays too far from the acceptable philosophical and intellectual areas surrounding the act and consequence of causing or contributing another person's death, in other words they might actually kill for sport, is deemed "abnormal." Something surely is wrong with an individual who would want and choose to kill someone else for fun. These people need to be stopped.
Not wanting to feel someone from the inside should be the last item on society's "To Do" list. Unfortunately, the human species (and thus society) survives solely because of sex, dating, and intellectually speaking, marriage. Society is able to replicate its norms and mores not simply because they're passed down orally or graphically (or unconsciously), but also because of the recreation of certain stories. Boy doesn't exclusively meet girl (or in the non-heteronormative version, boy/girl doesn't exclusively meet boy/girl) in the romantic comedy. They meet in action films, dark comedies, film noir, action, mystery-suspense, and horror/thriller. Love subplots don't always have to end in or be about sex, but they frequently are--because more characters in films already have friends. Or, if they don't, they have some kind of friend surrogate (co-worker, law enforcement partner, boss, teacher, religious leader). They either search for or stumble upon what they don't have. Conventional society determines this lack must be someone to have kids with--even if nobody wants kids.
Aside from any ideological, neurological, or psychologically motivated differences that would lead to committing crimes, people who think and behave differently have always had to deal with the same kind of questions and criticisms (Galileo). There's a pretty big range of what is considered normal and abnormal and for some reason, little to no desire to copulate or express affection through physical intimacy is the weirdest of them all.
Funny Face is my favorite musical. Despite its indication that emotional and physical connection trumps an intellectual one, the message is still that a real connection trumps a fake one. That Jo Stockton suddenly becomes aware of physical sensations is ostensibly incidental and operates primarily to complement the plot.
Shortly after he leaves the store, she sings "How Long Has This Been Going On?"
Jo muses, "I was taught that I ought not expose my inner senses. Had no plan for a man, I was full of self-defenses. Now I feel that I really must face the consequences. My philosophic search, has left me in a lurch. I must find why my mind is behaving like a dancer. What's the clue to pursue for I have to have the answer? I could cry salty tears, where have I been all these years? How long has this been going on?"
In other words, Jo's intellectual pursuits have somehow side-tracked her interest in or perception of physical intimacy. For the normative audience, for people who subscribe to the dominant fiction (house, wife, two kids, half a dog), which is the majority of society, wanting to be kissed, held, caressed, and deflowered is about as natural as breathing and as expected as the aspirations to change the world. True, not everyone believes in marriage or has any conscious aim to find a spouse (even own a house, have the kids, or half a dog), but most of these people still crave that kiss, touch, and passion--love as expressed through physical intimacy (or in some cases physical intimacy without any emotional investment).
Nonetheless, there are individuals living amongst the normative-loving citizens who desire one but not the other or neither. They still want emotional closeness but have no interest in the joining of two bodies such that reproduction might occur if precautions are not taken. Or, they crave neither emotional nor physical bonding. Solitary creatures to the core.
Preferring to be alone isn't a problem. It's not that uncommon (observations across various discussion boards across the internet), but it goes against the dominant fiction. Loners tend to be romanticized in narratives that involve mysterious, tall, dark, and handsome strangers or the gunfighter heroes of the Old West.
Sociologically speaking, it makes sense that society's members agree upon what is right and what is wrong. A concept of courtesy, consideration, and that stealing and killing is wrong (and illegal) is designed to provide structure and monitor human behavior. Believing that certain kinds of killing is more acceptable than others (due to context or parties involved) is fine. We have to support this view, otherwise killing in self-defense would mean absolutely nothing in a court of law (not to mention what occurs during war times and sting operations).
Anyone who strays too far from the acceptable philosophical and intellectual areas surrounding the act and consequence of causing or contributing another person's death, in other words they might actually kill for sport, is deemed "abnormal." Something surely is wrong with an individual who would want and choose to kill someone else for fun. These people need to be stopped.
Not wanting to feel someone from the inside should be the last item on society's "To Do" list. Unfortunately, the human species (and thus society) survives solely because of sex, dating, and intellectually speaking, marriage. Society is able to replicate its norms and mores not simply because they're passed down orally or graphically (or unconsciously), but also because of the recreation of certain stories. Boy doesn't exclusively meet girl (or in the non-heteronormative version, boy/girl doesn't exclusively meet boy/girl) in the romantic comedy. They meet in action films, dark comedies, film noir, action, mystery-suspense, and horror/thriller. Love subplots don't always have to end in or be about sex, but they frequently are--because more characters in films already have friends. Or, if they don't, they have some kind of friend surrogate (co-worker, law enforcement partner, boss, teacher, religious leader). They either search for or stumble upon what they don't have. Conventional society determines this lack must be someone to have kids with--even if nobody wants kids.
Aside from any ideological, neurological, or psychologically motivated differences that would lead to committing crimes, people who think and behave differently have always had to deal with the same kind of questions and criticisms (Galileo). There's a pretty big range of what is considered normal and abnormal and for some reason, little to no desire to copulate or express affection through physical intimacy is the weirdest of them all.
Funny Face is my favorite musical. Despite its indication that emotional and physical connection trumps an intellectual one, the message is still that a real connection trumps a fake one. That Jo Stockton suddenly becomes aware of physical sensations is ostensibly incidental and operates primarily to complement the plot.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Working through Widescreen: David Bordwell on Cinemascope
David Bordwell's observations and arguments on filmmaking have danced across, spun into, and consumed the brains of cinephiles and just about every university student who has taken a class on film theory or history.
He spoke at Emory University, my alma mater, today. Excluding the students who had to or were strongly encouraged (extra credit) to attend his lecture, I wouldn't be surprised if at least half of the remaining audience members were there as a fan or at least an intellectual admirer of his work.
I reviewed his book The Way Hollywood Tells It this past spring for my historiography seminar and had read most of The Classical Hollywood Cinema for the same class.
I bought Bordwell's book Figures Traced in Light after the talk today, and I got him to autograph it and draw me a tropical fruit blossom.
John Orr reviewed it for Senses of Cinema, which you can find here.
David Bordwell is a very engaging speaker; and I daresay I'm more inclined to believe or agree with his views if he were to tell them to me rather than if I were to read those thoughts.
The lecture he gave was on Cinemascope and the ways in which Hollywood filmmakers of the 1950s had to negotiate filming and telling stories as effectively as possible and with new technology. His presentation included a wealth of screen captures that illuminated and bolstered his analysis. Bordwell noticed three primary methods that Hollywood directors dealt with having to make movies with cameras fitted with widescreen lenses and that would be seen in theatres with modified projectors.
A: Direct in rows, fill horizontal space.
B: Choreograph actors' movements such that depth-of-field and diagonal lines would complement whatever narrative and thematic priorities a particular shot or scene demanded.
C: Design the shot or scene anticipating a cropping out of significant vertical space (the areas at the top and bottom of the screen). Close-ups of faces would probably not be too flattering in this case.
Now when I (re)watch American films from the 1950s, I'm going to pay closer attention to where the actors are standing and how they move through space and which of the aforementioned techniques is implemented. In fact, I'm going to have to watch Knute Rockne, All American and Jim Thorpe, All American again and consider how the actors and football game-play are filmed vis-a-vis the absence of widescreen.
David Bordwell definitely has the look of a scholar, though not exclusively of film. He could pass for an anthropologist, an economist, a physicist, and even a criminologist. For a glimpse, click here, scroll all the way down, and look left.
pix creds: amazon.com
Originally posted at Sthemingway.
He spoke at Emory University, my alma mater, today. Excluding the students who had to or were strongly encouraged (extra credit) to attend his lecture, I wouldn't be surprised if at least half of the remaining audience members were there as a fan or at least an intellectual admirer of his work.
I reviewed his book The Way Hollywood Tells It this past spring for my historiography seminar and had read most of The Classical Hollywood Cinema for the same class.
I bought Bordwell's book Figures Traced in Light after the talk today, and I got him to autograph it and draw me a tropical fruit blossom.
John Orr reviewed it for Senses of Cinema, which you can find here.
David Bordwell is a very engaging speaker; and I daresay I'm more inclined to believe or agree with his views if he were to tell them to me rather than if I were to read those thoughts.
The lecture he gave was on Cinemascope and the ways in which Hollywood filmmakers of the 1950s had to negotiate filming and telling stories as effectively as possible and with new technology. His presentation included a wealth of screen captures that illuminated and bolstered his analysis. Bordwell noticed three primary methods that Hollywood directors dealt with having to make movies with cameras fitted with widescreen lenses and that would be seen in theatres with modified projectors.
A: Direct in rows, fill horizontal space.
B: Choreograph actors' movements such that depth-of-field and diagonal lines would complement whatever narrative and thematic priorities a particular shot or scene demanded.
C: Design the shot or scene anticipating a cropping out of significant vertical space (the areas at the top and bottom of the screen). Close-ups of faces would probably not be too flattering in this case.
Now when I (re)watch American films from the 1950s, I'm going to pay closer attention to where the actors are standing and how they move through space and which of the aforementioned techniques is implemented. In fact, I'm going to have to watch Knute Rockne, All American and Jim Thorpe, All American again and consider how the actors and football game-play are filmed vis-a-vis the absence of widescreen.
David Bordwell definitely has the look of a scholar, though not exclusively of film. He could pass for an anthropologist, an economist, a physicist, and even a criminologist. For a glimpse, click here, scroll all the way down, and look left.
pix creds: amazon.com
Originally posted at Sthemingway.
Friday, September 21, 2007
Gracie: You Wish I Was Born a Boy, Don't You?
Gracie (David Guggenheim, 2007) played in theatres in Atlanta, GA for less than a month. I was going to watch it then but didn’t get around to it.
Well, it’s now available to rent at Blockbuster and to buy at your favorite neighborhood mega-entertainment store or online retailer.
Loosely drawn from the childhoods of actors Andrew Shue and Elizabeth Shue, Gracie combines the models of sports inspirational and coming-of-age to tell the story of a young girl (Carly Schroeder) who finds a way to convince “society” to let her do what she loves the most in the whole world: play futbol.
Andrew Shue explains in the making-of featurette that for the past ten years, he has wanted to make an underdog movie about futbol. I believe the director adds that the film was originally supposed to focus on a father-son relationship but eventually became one about a father and a daughter. Having just lost their oldest son (who was a naturally gifted futbol player) to a collision with a drunk driver, Lindsay (Elizabeth Shue) and Bryan Bowen (Dermot Mulroney) try the best that they can to raise the rest of their kids: Mike (Hunter Schroeder), Daniel (Trevor Heins), and Gracie.
As the film reveals, this endeavor consists primarily of Gracie wanting her father to coach and train her so that she can play futbol for the varsity boys’ team in the next school year and help them defeat Kingston, the school that her brother Johnny (Jesse Lee Soffer) played against in the beginning of the film–the last game he would ever play. Gracie’s dad isn’t very keen on the idea. Initially, his less than lukewarm support is due to the gender excuse–girls aren’t tough enough, girls shouldn’t have to risk injury. Over time, however, the hesitation is fueled by his own doubt in her ability and belief in herself. Thematically speaking (within the sports-inspirational framework), Gracie aims to express its protagonist’s psychological journey from sulking teenager to futbol player.
Overall, despite the metaphorical purpose futbol serves (sports provide structure and an outlet for frustration), Guggenheim’s film is less of a sports film and more of a coming-of-age film. You could take the futbol out and replace it with singing, painting, writing, musical instrument-playing, horseback riding, or even chess, and whatever that activity might be would still function in the same way narratively and thematically.
After all, there are only two futbol games (one at the beginning and one at the end), two proper practices (tryouts for the varsity team and a drill session for the junior varsity team), and half a dozen or so sequences where Gracie practices by herself, with her dad, or with other characters (with or without the presence of a ball). Moreover, at least forty-five minutes of the ninety-five minute-long film address Gracie’s inner struggles. The person that meant the most to her is dead, her own father might as well wish that she was born a guy, and social pressures of being an alluring teenage girl just get in the way of a meaningful existence, which may not even be attainable anymore.
The futbol element, though, is necessary because the film’s 1978 setting compels the inclusion of certain culturally revolutionizing events and mentalities. Gracie might not enunciate explicitly the words “women’s liberation,” there are discussions, dialogue pieces that confront the issue of whether or not a female is physically and mentally capable of participating in rough (boy) sports. More importantly, though, is the spotlight on Title IX. On the one hand, its place within the narrative and the performance of the particular scene comes off as slightly “convenient” or, if I felt like being mean, a wee bit corny. On the other hand, its appearance in the film makes absolute sense and is essential. I also have to point out that she spends the night in her brother's room (the second night after she and her family learn of his death), and she wakes up determined to play futbol. I'm very glad the director didn't feel the need to have Gracie cut her hair short.
The futbol also allows Gracie to sort out a conflict with one of the varsity players in a considerably satisfying way. It might be indirect payback, but it’s dual-layered. I don’t want to say more about it–you should just watch the film.
All right, now on to the aesthetics of filmed futbol. Some of these thoughts are from one of my LJ entries. I haven’t watched much televised futbol, but I did watch a couple of the World Cup games from June 2006, including the match between South Korea and France. As the game progressed, I started thinking about its aesthetic and functional differences with other team sports. I tend to get bored with futbol, which it doesnt make sense because I like hockey. As I’ve probably articulated before, hockey and futbol are basically the same game–they just have different uniforms and gear.
Compared to football, futbol is more fast-paced. The ball is constantly moving, but so few goals are ever scored, and it commonly takes a long time for numbers to go on the score board. After fifteen minutes of game-play, a football team could get 21 points (three touchdowns and one field goal), while a futbol team might scored 1 point (one goal). With football, although the action of the game-play lasts a few seconds to a couple minutes, and repeats for four quarters, something about it is easier for me to enjoy.
Futbol doesn’t excite me as much or make me happy because it’s ideologically, it’s more blatantly maximum effort, minimum results. The players are running back and forth, blocking and kicking…and after thirty minutes of game-play, there may not have been any goals scored. I realize that two quarters of football can go by without anyone making a touchdown or a field goal; and even if no interceptions or fifty yard+ drives are made, the aesthetics of the game-play still make me smile. Should I thank the TV network’s production staff for that feeling?
Probably.
Advertizers must prefer football because there are more places for commercials. ^0^
When I was watching the South Korea vs. France game, I observed that most of the game-play was filmed from a high-angle, long shot perspective, probably because any other angle or shot scale would undermine the speed at which the players were running. Televised instant slow-motion replays were incorporated less frequently. When they were employed so that the commentator could discuss the previous sequence (whether or not a goal was made or if a deflected ball should be counted as a goal given where it was deflected), the instant replay footage itself wasn’t necessarily so great because the cameramen didn’t capture it from an optimal angle.
The two games in Gracie were filmed on a field that didn’t have any line markings aside from the boundaries of the playing stage itself and the area in front of the goal posts/nets. I don’t recall there being any high–angle points-of-view other than a couple of crane shots from behind and over the goal nets. Theoretically, then, it’s possible or arguable that editing a futbol sequence is less headache-inducing than a football sequence, assuming that each editor has sufficient, equal amounts of coverage (wider shots where the entire field is visible, medium shots of players’ in motion, close-ups of feet, hands, and faces). Match-on-action cuts would be just as time-consuming and would require near obsessive-compulsive attention to detail, but as far as ordering a series of game-play, the futbol movie editor has got to be much less stressed than the football movie editor.
I won’t talk any more about the film’s plot trajectory, because I want you to see it for yourself, but I do want to present the following:
Lessons That Gracie Teaches:
1. Don’t ever discourage your daughter (or sister or girlfriend or niece) from participating in traditionally male athletic activities for fun or for sport. If she wants to try out for a school or the local town/county/state team, let her and support her. Otherwise, she could adopt the ways of the stereotypical, anti-authority male–and that’s no picnic. Worry about the intersection of athlete-and-trouble-maker when/if it happens.
2. Don’t ever tell a female she can’t do something just because she isn’t male. You’ve seen the films where a male is told he isn’t smart/fast/strong enough to accomplish something and what does he do? He does just about everything he can do prove his critics wrong. Imagine what a female who gives a flying frappuccino would do if she were told that it is solely her sex and gender that makes her inadequate. I wouldn’t want to be the one to have doubted her.
3. Expectations are placed equally on young men and women to behave a certain way (with each other or with society) and to develop interests in particular activities. As Lindsay Bowen tells Gracie near the end of the film, after having experienced another setback, something along the lines of “you can limit yourself if you want to, but don’t let other people do it for you.” On the flip side, don’t feel obliged to be like everyone else or what they assume you’ll be. Be what you want to be…..so long as no laws are broken in the process.
Doesn’t she almost look like a field goal kicker for a football team? The back cover of the DVD offers an even more convincing pose.
Notice how Gracie is sitting in the middle of the cheerleaders and the other futbol players.
Gracie rated PG-13 for brief sexual content.
The stunts crew consists of Jared Burke, Blaise Corrigan, Stephen Mann, and Anthony Vincent.
Dan Metcalfe is the futbol coordinator. Andrew Shue and Elizabeth Shue both grew up playing soccer, so they undoubtedly contribued to the futbol sequences.
For more information on Title IX, please visit its official site here.
pix cred: yahoo movies & amazon.com
Originally posted at Sitting Pugs.
Well, it’s now available to rent at Blockbuster and to buy at your favorite neighborhood mega-entertainment store or online retailer.
Loosely drawn from the childhoods of actors Andrew Shue and Elizabeth Shue, Gracie combines the models of sports inspirational and coming-of-age to tell the story of a young girl (Carly Schroeder) who finds a way to convince “society” to let her do what she loves the most in the whole world: play futbol.
Andrew Shue explains in the making-of featurette that for the past ten years, he has wanted to make an underdog movie about futbol. I believe the director adds that the film was originally supposed to focus on a father-son relationship but eventually became one about a father and a daughter. Having just lost their oldest son (who was a naturally gifted futbol player) to a collision with a drunk driver, Lindsay (Elizabeth Shue) and Bryan Bowen (Dermot Mulroney) try the best that they can to raise the rest of their kids: Mike (Hunter Schroeder), Daniel (Trevor Heins), and Gracie.
As the film reveals, this endeavor consists primarily of Gracie wanting her father to coach and train her so that she can play futbol for the varsity boys’ team in the next school year and help them defeat Kingston, the school that her brother Johnny (Jesse Lee Soffer) played against in the beginning of the film–the last game he would ever play. Gracie’s dad isn’t very keen on the idea. Initially, his less than lukewarm support is due to the gender excuse–girls aren’t tough enough, girls shouldn’t have to risk injury. Over time, however, the hesitation is fueled by his own doubt in her ability and belief in herself. Thematically speaking (within the sports-inspirational framework), Gracie aims to express its protagonist’s psychological journey from sulking teenager to futbol player.
Overall, despite the metaphorical purpose futbol serves (sports provide structure and an outlet for frustration), Guggenheim’s film is less of a sports film and more of a coming-of-age film. You could take the futbol out and replace it with singing, painting, writing, musical instrument-playing, horseback riding, or even chess, and whatever that activity might be would still function in the same way narratively and thematically.
After all, there are only two futbol games (one at the beginning and one at the end), two proper practices (tryouts for the varsity team and a drill session for the junior varsity team), and half a dozen or so sequences where Gracie practices by herself, with her dad, or with other characters (with or without the presence of a ball). Moreover, at least forty-five minutes of the ninety-five minute-long film address Gracie’s inner struggles. The person that meant the most to her is dead, her own father might as well wish that she was born a guy, and social pressures of being an alluring teenage girl just get in the way of a meaningful existence, which may not even be attainable anymore.
The futbol element, though, is necessary because the film’s 1978 setting compels the inclusion of certain culturally revolutionizing events and mentalities. Gracie might not enunciate explicitly the words “women’s liberation,” there are discussions, dialogue pieces that confront the issue of whether or not a female is physically and mentally capable of participating in rough (boy) sports. More importantly, though, is the spotlight on Title IX. On the one hand, its place within the narrative and the performance of the particular scene comes off as slightly “convenient” or, if I felt like being mean, a wee bit corny. On the other hand, its appearance in the film makes absolute sense and is essential. I also have to point out that she spends the night in her brother's room (the second night after she and her family learn of his death), and she wakes up determined to play futbol. I'm very glad the director didn't feel the need to have Gracie cut her hair short.
The futbol also allows Gracie to sort out a conflict with one of the varsity players in a considerably satisfying way. It might be indirect payback, but it’s dual-layered. I don’t want to say more about it–you should just watch the film.
All right, now on to the aesthetics of filmed futbol. Some of these thoughts are from one of my LJ entries. I haven’t watched much televised futbol, but I did watch a couple of the World Cup games from June 2006, including the match between South Korea and France. As the game progressed, I started thinking about its aesthetic and functional differences with other team sports. I tend to get bored with futbol, which it doesnt make sense because I like hockey. As I’ve probably articulated before, hockey and futbol are basically the same game–they just have different uniforms and gear.
Compared to football, futbol is more fast-paced. The ball is constantly moving, but so few goals are ever scored, and it commonly takes a long time for numbers to go on the score board. After fifteen minutes of game-play, a football team could get 21 points (three touchdowns and one field goal), while a futbol team might scored 1 point (one goal). With football, although the action of the game-play lasts a few seconds to a couple minutes, and repeats for four quarters, something about it is easier for me to enjoy.
Futbol doesn’t excite me as much or make me happy because it’s ideologically, it’s more blatantly maximum effort, minimum results. The players are running back and forth, blocking and kicking…and after thirty minutes of game-play, there may not have been any goals scored. I realize that two quarters of football can go by without anyone making a touchdown or a field goal; and even if no interceptions or fifty yard+ drives are made, the aesthetics of the game-play still make me smile. Should I thank the TV network’s production staff for that feeling?
Probably.
Advertizers must prefer football because there are more places for commercials. ^0^
When I was watching the South Korea vs. France game, I observed that most of the game-play was filmed from a high-angle, long shot perspective, probably because any other angle or shot scale would undermine the speed at which the players were running. Televised instant slow-motion replays were incorporated less frequently. When they were employed so that the commentator could discuss the previous sequence (whether or not a goal was made or if a deflected ball should be counted as a goal given where it was deflected), the instant replay footage itself wasn’t necessarily so great because the cameramen didn’t capture it from an optimal angle.
The two games in Gracie were filmed on a field that didn’t have any line markings aside from the boundaries of the playing stage itself and the area in front of the goal posts/nets. I don’t recall there being any high–angle points-of-view other than a couple of crane shots from behind and over the goal nets. Theoretically, then, it’s possible or arguable that editing a futbol sequence is less headache-inducing than a football sequence, assuming that each editor has sufficient, equal amounts of coverage (wider shots where the entire field is visible, medium shots of players’ in motion, close-ups of feet, hands, and faces). Match-on-action cuts would be just as time-consuming and would require near obsessive-compulsive attention to detail, but as far as ordering a series of game-play, the futbol movie editor has got to be much less stressed than the football movie editor.
I won’t talk any more about the film’s plot trajectory, because I want you to see it for yourself, but I do want to present the following:
Lessons That Gracie Teaches:
1. Don’t ever discourage your daughter (or sister or girlfriend or niece) from participating in traditionally male athletic activities for fun or for sport. If she wants to try out for a school or the local town/county/state team, let her and support her. Otherwise, she could adopt the ways of the stereotypical, anti-authority male–and that’s no picnic. Worry about the intersection of athlete-and-trouble-maker when/if it happens.
2. Don’t ever tell a female she can’t do something just because she isn’t male. You’ve seen the films where a male is told he isn’t smart/fast/strong enough to accomplish something and what does he do? He does just about everything he can do prove his critics wrong. Imagine what a female who gives a flying frappuccino would do if she were told that it is solely her sex and gender that makes her inadequate. I wouldn’t want to be the one to have doubted her.
3. Expectations are placed equally on young men and women to behave a certain way (with each other or with society) and to develop interests in particular activities. As Lindsay Bowen tells Gracie near the end of the film, after having experienced another setback, something along the lines of “you can limit yourself if you want to, but don’t let other people do it for you.” On the flip side, don’t feel obliged to be like everyone else or what they assume you’ll be. Be what you want to be…..so long as no laws are broken in the process.
Doesn’t she almost look like a field goal kicker for a football team? The back cover of the DVD offers an even more convincing pose.
Notice how Gracie is sitting in the middle of the cheerleaders and the other futbol players.
Gracie rated PG-13 for brief sexual content.
The stunts crew consists of Jared Burke, Blaise Corrigan, Stephen Mann, and Anthony Vincent.
Dan Metcalfe is the futbol coordinator. Andrew Shue and Elizabeth Shue both grew up playing soccer, so they undoubtedly contribued to the futbol sequences.
For more information on Title IX, please visit its official site here.
pix cred: yahoo movies & amazon.com
Originally posted at Sitting Pugs.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Belinda Luscombe on (romantic) comedies
I picked up the August 20, 2007 issue (Vol. 170 No. 8) of Time Magazine and read an educational and somewhat disheartening article about the future of the American romantic comedy.
Belinda Luscombe writes:
Love stories are old. They're universal. Nearly everyone has one. Which makes them nearly impossible to write well. This summer has brought us License to Wed, in which a couple is nearly driven apart by their wacky priest's marriage-prep course; I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, in which Adam Sandler pretends to marry his firefighter buddy for health-insurance reasons; No Reservations, in which two competitive chefs fall in love; and Becoming Jane, in which Jane Austen has to choose between love and proper behavior. Coming in September is Good Luck Chuck, in which every girl Chuck sleeps with goes on to marry the next guy she meets. All of them, except the Austen, are what's known in the romance-novel business as HEAs (happily-ever-afters), and none of them are remotely stirring, although Good Luck Chuck is spectacularly off-putting. "Romantic comedies are backbreaking to write because they have to be fresh," says Mike Newell, director of Four Weddings and a Funeral and the upcoming Love in the Time of Cholera. "I've yet to find another one which was surprising enough to do."
But it's not just familiarity that breeds contempt for love stories. It may be actually getting harder to get people to believe in them, acknowledges Richard Curtis, writer of such indelible romances as Four Weddings and Notting Hill, because our expectations have changed. "If you write a story about a soldier going AWOL and kidnapping a pregnant woman and finally shooting her in the head, it's called searingly realistic, even though it's never happened in the history of mankind," he notes. "Whereas if you write about two people falling in love, which happens about a million times a day all over the world, for some reason or another, you're accused of writing something unrealistic and sentimental."
Luscombe mentions cultural and social changes over the last half century that may have affected the standard perception of romance and human interaction, which in turn likely makes romantic comedies harder to market. She also brings up the film Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007) and remarks that it "is the purest iteration of the so-called bromance form yet. Two best friends, Seth and Evan, on the verge of graduating from high school, have to get booze, get over the fact that they're about to go their separate ways and get girls before the night is out."
At first, I thought, "Wow. Perhaps the (romantic) comedy formula is changing--no longer is it about heterosexual sexual love; maybe the next move is platonic love." But then, that kind of story could simply be a comedy or a drama. I also thought "bromance" was a pretty clever term....that is until I realized that Luscombe might be using a synonym for the "buddy film."
Luscombe briefly addresses the profit-driven facet of Hollywood that almost demands quality be sacrificed for novelty or an ingenious marketing campaign so that opening weekend draws the biggest crowds. She incorporates a reception studies point-of-view when pointing out that young men flock to the cinema in slightly higher numbers--and probably more frequently--than women. I know this article isn't (and isn't supposed to be) scientific in approach, but if there was an undertaking to investigate further whether or not the romantic comedy as a genre is truly dying or adapting to a new collective consciousness or if there simply hasn't been a really good script in a long while, more variables would have to be considered and controlled.
Unfortunately, when it comes to the public's cinema-going habits, I doubt that there could be a study scientific enough. We're talking about people's preferences in aesthetics, narrative, and ideology. However consistent some individuals' or demographics' behavior may be, there are too many "but's" in the question. Furthermore, to be more thorough, DVD rentals, purchases, and library lending patterns and tendencies would have to be examined too.
To read Belinda Luscombe's article in its entirety, please click here.
Belinda Luscombe writes:
Love stories are old. They're universal. Nearly everyone has one. Which makes them nearly impossible to write well. This summer has brought us License to Wed, in which a couple is nearly driven apart by their wacky priest's marriage-prep course; I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, in which Adam Sandler pretends to marry his firefighter buddy for health-insurance reasons; No Reservations, in which two competitive chefs fall in love; and Becoming Jane, in which Jane Austen has to choose between love and proper behavior. Coming in September is Good Luck Chuck, in which every girl Chuck sleeps with goes on to marry the next guy she meets. All of them, except the Austen, are what's known in the romance-novel business as HEAs (happily-ever-afters), and none of them are remotely stirring, although Good Luck Chuck is spectacularly off-putting. "Romantic comedies are backbreaking to write because they have to be fresh," says Mike Newell, director of Four Weddings and a Funeral and the upcoming Love in the Time of Cholera. "I've yet to find another one which was surprising enough to do."
But it's not just familiarity that breeds contempt for love stories. It may be actually getting harder to get people to believe in them, acknowledges Richard Curtis, writer of such indelible romances as Four Weddings and Notting Hill, because our expectations have changed. "If you write a story about a soldier going AWOL and kidnapping a pregnant woman and finally shooting her in the head, it's called searingly realistic, even though it's never happened in the history of mankind," he notes. "Whereas if you write about two people falling in love, which happens about a million times a day all over the world, for some reason or another, you're accused of writing something unrealistic and sentimental."
Luscombe mentions cultural and social changes over the last half century that may have affected the standard perception of romance and human interaction, which in turn likely makes romantic comedies harder to market. She also brings up the film Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007) and remarks that it "is the purest iteration of the so-called bromance form yet. Two best friends, Seth and Evan, on the verge of graduating from high school, have to get booze, get over the fact that they're about to go their separate ways and get girls before the night is out."
At first, I thought, "Wow. Perhaps the (romantic) comedy formula is changing--no longer is it about heterosexual sexual love; maybe the next move is platonic love." But then, that kind of story could simply be a comedy or a drama. I also thought "bromance" was a pretty clever term....that is until I realized that Luscombe might be using a synonym for the "buddy film."
Luscombe briefly addresses the profit-driven facet of Hollywood that almost demands quality be sacrificed for novelty or an ingenious marketing campaign so that opening weekend draws the biggest crowds. She incorporates a reception studies point-of-view when pointing out that young men flock to the cinema in slightly higher numbers--and probably more frequently--than women. I know this article isn't (and isn't supposed to be) scientific in approach, but if there was an undertaking to investigate further whether or not the romantic comedy as a genre is truly dying or adapting to a new collective consciousness or if there simply hasn't been a really good script in a long while, more variables would have to be considered and controlled.
Unfortunately, when it comes to the public's cinema-going habits, I doubt that there could be a study scientific enough. We're talking about people's preferences in aesthetics, narrative, and ideology. However consistent some individuals' or demographics' behavior may be, there are too many "but's" in the question. Furthermore, to be more thorough, DVD rentals, purchases, and library lending patterns and tendencies would have to be examined too.
To read Belinda Luscombe's article in its entirety, please click here.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Good Night & three pennies
Isn't there some adage about people dying in three's?
Freshly baked from CNN:
ROME, Italy (Reuters) -- Michelangelo Antonioni, one of Italy's most famous and influential filmmakers, has died at the age of 94, city officials in Rome say.
Considered the cinematic father of modern angst and alienation, Antonioni had a career spanning six decades which included the Oscar-nominated "Blow-Up" and the internationally acclaimed "L'Avventura" (The Adventure).
His death on Monday night followed that of Swedish film legend Ingmar Bergman, who died on Monday aged 89.
"With Antonioni, not only has one of the greatest living directors been lost, but also a master of the modern screen," said Rome mayor Walter Veltroni Tuesday. His office said it was making plans for Antonioni's body to lie in state on Wednesday.
Antonioni's deliberately slow-moving and oblique movies were not always crowd pleasers but films such as "L'Avventura" turned him into an icon for directors like Martin Scorsese, who has described him as a poet with a camera.
Antonioni was born in 1912 in the northern Italian city of Ferrara. He directed his first feature, "Cronaca di un amore" ("Story of a Love Affair"), in 1950 at the age of 38.
Over the next two decades Antonioni worked with some of the greatest names in post-war Italian cinema like Marcello Mastroianni but it was not until the 1960s that he emerged on the international stage.
Read the rest of the article, press here
a few pertinent youtube clips:
Trailer from Criterion Collection edition.
Amazing long take from the film Professione: Reporter (1975)
Relevant articles from Senses of Cinema.com
Biographical piece by James Brown
Essay on L'Avventura by Gregory Solman
Discussion of Blowup by Jonathan Dawson
Film studies programs the world over need to brace themselves.
Any director who became famous or received critical acclaim just before or just after the world wars are going to make headlines within the decade.
pic cred: google image search
Freshly baked from CNN:
ROME, Italy (Reuters) -- Michelangelo Antonioni, one of Italy's most famous and influential filmmakers, has died at the age of 94, city officials in Rome say.
Considered the cinematic father of modern angst and alienation, Antonioni had a career spanning six decades which included the Oscar-nominated "Blow-Up" and the internationally acclaimed "L'Avventura" (The Adventure).
His death on Monday night followed that of Swedish film legend Ingmar Bergman, who died on Monday aged 89.
"With Antonioni, not only has one of the greatest living directors been lost, but also a master of the modern screen," said Rome mayor Walter Veltroni Tuesday. His office said it was making plans for Antonioni's body to lie in state on Wednesday.
Antonioni's deliberately slow-moving and oblique movies were not always crowd pleasers but films such as "L'Avventura" turned him into an icon for directors like Martin Scorsese, who has described him as a poet with a camera.
Antonioni was born in 1912 in the northern Italian city of Ferrara. He directed his first feature, "Cronaca di un amore" ("Story of a Love Affair"), in 1950 at the age of 38.
Over the next two decades Antonioni worked with some of the greatest names in post-war Italian cinema like Marcello Mastroianni but it was not until the 1960s that he emerged on the international stage.
Read the rest of the article, press here
a few pertinent youtube clips:
Trailer from Criterion Collection edition.
Amazing long take from the film Professione: Reporter (1975)
Relevant articles from Senses of Cinema.com
Biographical piece by James Brown
Essay on L'Avventura by Gregory Solman
Discussion of Blowup by Jonathan Dawson
Film studies programs the world over need to brace themselves.
Any director who became famous or received critical acclaim just before or just after the world wars are going to make headlines within the decade.
pic cred: google image search
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Smooth Criminal and Funny Face club scene: the less obvious comparison
It is fitting to discuss Fred Astaire when analyzing Michael Jackson's dancing style. However, a less obvious comparison may be Audrey Hepburn. Note that she too wears white socks with high-water, skinny black trousers and black penny loafers. The club scene in the film Funny Face (Stanely Donen, 1957) and Michael Jackson's video for the song "Smooth Criminal" are deserving of a close, comparative study. Jackson does at times move with the grace of a true ballerina.
Sunday, July 8, 2007
Cool Reads at Senses of Cinema
I declared myself a film major at Emory University in the spring semester of my freshman year (2000). At this time, the Internet was not a reliable enough source for academic research unless A. the web site or page from which one gathered information was maintained by a credible person (professor, industry expert) or organization (a film school, a museum, a library, an official site, online news sources) or B. the professor had recommended it for consulting. Reception studies (the study of how a text is consumed, processed, and manipulated by critics and the general population; aka part of the content of MIT professor Henry Jenkins's book Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture) wasn't as widespread then as it is now.
By the time I started taking film classes in my sophomore year (2000-2001), I found myself having to use the net to research the Japanese anime Revolutionary Girl Utena. By the time I graduated from undergrad in 2003, professors were more willing to accept a "Works Cited" page consisting of credible online sources. While I was in Emory's graduate film studies program (2005-2007), online research was deemed integral to the process not only because the number of legitimate cites had increased, but also because the kinds of research done--cultural studies, interdisciplinary studies, reception studies--sometimes demanded the incorporation of these sources.
One of the online sources that I used many times during my undergrad and graduate careers was a place called Senses Of Cinema, an online journal maintained by academics of a variety of humanities fields. I was browsing the site today and came across two very interesting and well-written articles, one about digital video and film stock, the other about the film Blade Runner.
Of all the many discussion board entries, essays, and columns written about the former topic, this one by Professor Wheeler Winston Dixon of the University of Nebraska is the best. Here is a brief excerpt:
Watching Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) on DVD, for example, 21st century viewers realize that they are watching (optimally) a 35mm negative transferred to digital memory and then downloaded to a DVD for home use, and that the final image they watch “copies” the filmic nature of the original image, but at the same time gives only the “impression” of its original source material. But given this a priori assumption, 21st century viewers quickly move past this empirical certainty to embrace this newly digitised image as the simulacrum of a 20th century medium. There is no sadness in this and no betrayal of the maker’s original intent; it is merely a translation from one image capture medium to another.
Certainly it can be argued that this is an oversimplification of a rather knotty problem; film comes with one set of values inherently present in the stock itself (a tendency towards warmth in colour for some film stocks, or towards cooler hues in others, as well as characteristics of grain, depth and definition which are unique to each individual film matrix), while the digital video image offers another entirely different set of characteristics, verging on a hyperreal glossiness that seems to shimmer on the screen. To achieve a reconsideration of the basic states of representationalism inherent in any comparison of these two mediums is a difficult task, calling into question more than a century of cinematic practice, and a host of assumptions shared by practitioners and viewers alike.
VCRs, along with a host of other factors, eventually killed drive-ins, making it possible to view a film at home with ease and convenience; DVDs wiped the VHS format out of existence a few years after their introduction. In the same fashion, second-run theatres were also killed off by the burgeoning DVD market, as the window between VHS and the theatrical release of a film and its appearance on DVD dwindled into nonexistence. And yet, as the public audience for 20th century cinema film becomes increasingly specialized and narrowly segmented, to the point that American Blockbuster stores no longer even bother with a token “classics” section – even such reliable standbys as Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942) are ignored in most of the chain’s stores – for those who embrace the past a wider range of films has become available. Often these DVDs go out of print in a matter of months, so one must purchase them immediately upon their release, as fetish objects that also have a temporal existence of their own, and a thriving bootleg “industry” exists as well, making copies of all but the most fugitive films available to the private collector.
To read the rest of the article, click here.
I've fallen asleep every time I've watched Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982). David C. Ryan's, assistant communications studies professor at the University of San Francisco, piece on the 25th anniversary edition, though, is remarkable. It has the best introductory paragraph ever. Yes, ever. Here is the introduction:
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner opened twenty-five years ago to scornful critics and a disappointed public confronted by a moody, violent and densely layered science fiction film governed by existential themes and Marxist tendencies. Most journalistic critics found the film’s tone aloof, its themes remote and its story too stark to digest. Although the film was valorised for its bold and rich production design and was praised as the cinematic phenomenon of technological artistry, Blade Runner was largely condemned and discarded as a curious and expensive debacle – full of powerful images yet plagued by inert intellectual rewards. Diverse American critics such as Pauline Kael and Stanley Kauffmann complained that the hero’s humanism lacked depth and verve, and that the story is clouded by confusing themes. Scott, they said, was far too interested in developing style rather than content, more interested in detailing his sets than developing his script. These views were (and are) unsatisfying.
To read the rest of the piece, click here.
Because I like Senses of Cinema so much not only for research but also for enlightenment, I have included it as one of the links on the right side of the main page.
Intuitor Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics is also a fantastic film-related site that I read just for fun. I haven't had the opportunity to write an essay that would make use of the site. It is also located on the right.
By the time I started taking film classes in my sophomore year (2000-2001), I found myself having to use the net to research the Japanese anime Revolutionary Girl Utena. By the time I graduated from undergrad in 2003, professors were more willing to accept a "Works Cited" page consisting of credible online sources. While I was in Emory's graduate film studies program (2005-2007), online research was deemed integral to the process not only because the number of legitimate cites had increased, but also because the kinds of research done--cultural studies, interdisciplinary studies, reception studies--sometimes demanded the incorporation of these sources.
One of the online sources that I used many times during my undergrad and graduate careers was a place called Senses Of Cinema, an online journal maintained by academics of a variety of humanities fields. I was browsing the site today and came across two very interesting and well-written articles, one about digital video and film stock, the other about the film Blade Runner.
Of all the many discussion board entries, essays, and columns written about the former topic, this one by Professor Wheeler Winston Dixon of the University of Nebraska is the best. Here is a brief excerpt:
Watching Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) on DVD, for example, 21st century viewers realize that they are watching (optimally) a 35mm negative transferred to digital memory and then downloaded to a DVD for home use, and that the final image they watch “copies” the filmic nature of the original image, but at the same time gives only the “impression” of its original source material. But given this a priori assumption, 21st century viewers quickly move past this empirical certainty to embrace this newly digitised image as the simulacrum of a 20th century medium. There is no sadness in this and no betrayal of the maker’s original intent; it is merely a translation from one image capture medium to another.
Certainly it can be argued that this is an oversimplification of a rather knotty problem; film comes with one set of values inherently present in the stock itself (a tendency towards warmth in colour for some film stocks, or towards cooler hues in others, as well as characteristics of grain, depth and definition which are unique to each individual film matrix), while the digital video image offers another entirely different set of characteristics, verging on a hyperreal glossiness that seems to shimmer on the screen. To achieve a reconsideration of the basic states of representationalism inherent in any comparison of these two mediums is a difficult task, calling into question more than a century of cinematic practice, and a host of assumptions shared by practitioners and viewers alike.
VCRs, along with a host of other factors, eventually killed drive-ins, making it possible to view a film at home with ease and convenience; DVDs wiped the VHS format out of existence a few years after their introduction. In the same fashion, second-run theatres were also killed off by the burgeoning DVD market, as the window between VHS and the theatrical release of a film and its appearance on DVD dwindled into nonexistence. And yet, as the public audience for 20th century cinema film becomes increasingly specialized and narrowly segmented, to the point that American Blockbuster stores no longer even bother with a token “classics” section – even such reliable standbys as Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942) are ignored in most of the chain’s stores – for those who embrace the past a wider range of films has become available. Often these DVDs go out of print in a matter of months, so one must purchase them immediately upon their release, as fetish objects that also have a temporal existence of their own, and a thriving bootleg “industry” exists as well, making copies of all but the most fugitive films available to the private collector.
To read the rest of the article, click here.
I've fallen asleep every time I've watched Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982). David C. Ryan's, assistant communications studies professor at the University of San Francisco, piece on the 25th anniversary edition, though, is remarkable. It has the best introductory paragraph ever. Yes, ever. Here is the introduction:
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner opened twenty-five years ago to scornful critics and a disappointed public confronted by a moody, violent and densely layered science fiction film governed by existential themes and Marxist tendencies. Most journalistic critics found the film’s tone aloof, its themes remote and its story too stark to digest. Although the film was valorised for its bold and rich production design and was praised as the cinematic phenomenon of technological artistry, Blade Runner was largely condemned and discarded as a curious and expensive debacle – full of powerful images yet plagued by inert intellectual rewards. Diverse American critics such as Pauline Kael and Stanley Kauffmann complained that the hero’s humanism lacked depth and verve, and that the story is clouded by confusing themes. Scott, they said, was far too interested in developing style rather than content, more interested in detailing his sets than developing his script. These views were (and are) unsatisfying.
To read the rest of the piece, click here.
Because I like Senses of Cinema so much not only for research but also for enlightenment, I have included it as one of the links on the right side of the main page.
Intuitor Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics is also a fantastic film-related site that I read just for fun. I haven't had the opportunity to write an essay that would make use of the site. It is also located on the right.
Artists Separated at Face: Maya Deren & Kate Bush
Dancer and experimental filmmaker Maya Deren's short film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)is probably the most widely screened example of avant-garde and experimental or feminist filmmaking. I first saw it when I took Introduction to Film Studies in 2000 and found it simultaneously mesmerizing and unsettling. I watched some more of her work when I took a female directors graduate seminar in 2005. After a few more viewings of Meshes of the Afternoon, I was still mesmerized but not nearly as unsettled.
Observe:
A Study in Choreography For Camera (1945) is really fascinating as well (and not the least bit unnerving).
Maya Deren was also a philosopher and film theorist.
Her films are often included in the curriculum for film classes and feminist theory classes, but I'm not sure about dance classes. A choreographer and filmmaker visited Emory in the spring of 2004 to give a talk about how video technology and choreography intersect. I attended the lecture to do research for my Operational Aesthetics paper on televised football. During the Q & A section, I asked if Maya Deren were making her films now, how would her work be received? The choreographer gave the audience a very brief bio about her "in case anyone wasn't familiar with her work." I wouldn't be surprised if more students out of Intro to Film or Psychoanalysis or Women's Studies knew her name and had seen Meshes of the Afternoon than students out of Dance Theory.
The title of this entry is so named because there is another female artist whose work I find absolutely intriguing and who could be Maya Deren's twin aesthetically and creatively. Her name is Kate Bush.
Observe:
Bjork might be more blatantly eccentric and surreal than Kate Bush, but I think there's an unmistakable Maya Deren presence in Kate Bush's music videos. I don't remember the first time I heard Kate's song "Running Up That Hill," but it was on a cassette tape a poet friend of mine sent to me years ago, and it sounded so familiar. There is a moment in my past that I cannot recall!
Musically and lyrically, some people would more readily cite a Tori Amos connection with the following song (a reverse connection that is, since Kate Bush was releasing music a decade before Tori). To me, though, the visuals make the song more Maya.
Observe:
Maya:
Kate:
If she feels so inclined, Ishtar might reprint an entry she wrote on Kate Bush in her personal blog.
Also posted at Sthemingway
pic creds: google image search
Observe:
A Study in Choreography For Camera (1945) is really fascinating as well (and not the least bit unnerving).
Maya Deren was also a philosopher and film theorist.
Her films are often included in the curriculum for film classes and feminist theory classes, but I'm not sure about dance classes. A choreographer and filmmaker visited Emory in the spring of 2004 to give a talk about how video technology and choreography intersect. I attended the lecture to do research for my Operational Aesthetics paper on televised football. During the Q & A section, I asked if Maya Deren were making her films now, how would her work be received? The choreographer gave the audience a very brief bio about her "in case anyone wasn't familiar with her work." I wouldn't be surprised if more students out of Intro to Film or Psychoanalysis or Women's Studies knew her name and had seen Meshes of the Afternoon than students out of Dance Theory.
The title of this entry is so named because there is another female artist whose work I find absolutely intriguing and who could be Maya Deren's twin aesthetically and creatively. Her name is Kate Bush.
Observe:
Bjork might be more blatantly eccentric and surreal than Kate Bush, but I think there's an unmistakable Maya Deren presence in Kate Bush's music videos. I don't remember the first time I heard Kate's song "Running Up That Hill," but it was on a cassette tape a poet friend of mine sent to me years ago, and it sounded so familiar. There is a moment in my past that I cannot recall!
Musically and lyrically, some people would more readily cite a Tori Amos connection with the following song (a reverse connection that is, since Kate Bush was releasing music a decade before Tori). To me, though, the visuals make the song more Maya.
Observe:
Maya:
Kate:
If she feels so inclined, Ishtar might reprint an entry she wrote on Kate Bush in her personal blog.
Also posted at Sthemingway
pic creds: google image search
Thursday, July 5, 2007
Love Road Basketball Glory
I’ve always been more or less neutral towards basketball and futbol. Though both sports are momentum-driven and require their athletes to move with lightning speed pretty much all the time, I never took to either sport via telecasts.
March Madness comes and goes on TV without a glance from me; same thing with the NBA Finals. A friend of mine is a huge basketball fan and while I was working on my thesis, he would frankly insist that shooting hoops was superior to making touchdowns…conceptually and in actuality. Basketball, he argued, demands a lot more out of its players than football does its own. Excelling at the former sport utilizes a combination of intelligence, athletic ability, and talent that surpasses that of the latter.
I still love the gridiron game, but I have to admit that my appreciation for basketball has increased considerably after watching Love & Basketball (Gina Prince-Bythewood, 2000) and Glory Road (James Gartner, 2006).
I vaguely remember Gina Prince-Bythewood’s film being in the theatres. As it turns out, I was less familiar with its plot than I was with the film’s place in the year 2000. Prior to watching the film, I had not read up on what the film was about–I knew there was basketball and a romance subplot. I didn’t know that the lead female character would be playing ball too.
Written and directed by Prince-Bythewood, Love & Basketball follows Monica Wright (Sanaa Lathan) and Quincy McCall (Omar Epps) from childhood to early adulthood as they pursue their NBA dreams and grapple with the distractions and tensions commensurate with realizing their respective goals. The film is divided into four parts. It begins with Monica and Quincy as pre-teens (played by Kyla Pratt and Glenndon Chatman respectively), establishing how they first meet. She’s the new next-door neighbor and can play ball just as hard as he can.
The second, third, and fourth sections of the film focus on a different period of their lives. “Second Quarter” covers the 1988 basketball season at Crenshaw High School where Monica plays on the girls team and Quincy the boys. “Third Quarter” spans the 1988-1989 schoolyear at USC where Monica and Quincy also play basketball as freshmen. The “Fourth Quarter” looks at both characters’ lives in 1993; Monica has been playing for Spain for seven months and Quincy is recovering from a torn ACL injury he sustained while playing for the Lakers. The love component to the story manifests itself through Monica and Quincy as they realize that they mean more to each other than default friend.
In addition to developing the mutual attraction and affection between the two main characters, Prince-Bythewood’s film also uses this relationship to raise questions about gender roles and equality. Monica isn’t simply characterized as a tomboy or even slightly more athletic than her mother would like. She is feisty, temperamental, and a fighter. Quincy’s “personality” is less complex and functions more as a counterpart to Monica. In fact, as sports movies go, Love & Basketball virtually reverses the gender dynamics of its two primary student-athletes–at the very least, it assigns certain qualities typically associated with the (male) athlete to Monica rather than to Quincy.
For instance, the object of most sports films is to present a coming-of-age or redemption narrative by forcing its protagonist (an individual or a team) to learn the hard way how to succeed. Whoever is a bit too cocky, a bit too introverted, or a bit too unruly are all made to recognize and then relinquish or re-appropriate those characteristics. Along this journey, the protagonist must overcome obstacles and conflicts such as his own pride or fear as well as others’ critcisms.
Love & Basketball re-works this narrative pattern by offering cockiness and stubborness to Monica. She exhibits the attitude of an athlete who prioritizes the game above all else. Quincy, on the other hand, provides a contrast to that mentality by assuming somewhat of feminized position within their relationship. She is “better” at the game than he is; and while he still participates in archetypically male behavior (with female characters), the film is more interested in defining him in terms of or against his father, a former Clippers player (Dennis Haysbert) who proves to be a less than ideal role model. When the like-father-like-son mentality that Quincy had been carrying all his life suddenly fails to suffice, his insecurities become too much for him.
I would argue that Prince-Bythewood’s film is more about Monica and Quincy as individual basketball players one a thematic level. Furthermore, it is the way in which their lives play out on and off the court that builds and fuels the viewer’s concern. I’m not one to pull out the “F” word lightly, but I think it’s relevant here. From a narrative and ideological perspective, Love & Basketball can be considered a feminist film. That the film features a real high school (Crenshaw) that is known for its great girls and boys basketball teams and real USC women’s basketball players or that the story depicts Monica as more of the athlete (including being shouted at repeatedly by her USC coach) is just part of it.
I think the film has feminist undertones because it allows basketball to serve metaphorical purposes for Monica instead of Quincy. I don’t want to give away the last important scene in the film (or the film’s ending for that matter) because I really enjoyed Love & Basketball and highly recommend it. I will, however, say that the game means to Monica something that is usually associated with young males.
This film conveys the basketball-is-not-just-a-game message but through the eyes of a female. I’m sure some feminists would find it problematic that the film can’t tell this story without making Monica adopt a few male-athlete personality traits but I have no complaints. I don’t even mind the love thread–in the end, it works out better than I could have imagined. So go Netflix it or Blockbuster it today!
Originally posted at Sitting Pugs. To read about Glory Road, click here.
March Madness comes and goes on TV without a glance from me; same thing with the NBA Finals. A friend of mine is a huge basketball fan and while I was working on my thesis, he would frankly insist that shooting hoops was superior to making touchdowns…conceptually and in actuality. Basketball, he argued, demands a lot more out of its players than football does its own. Excelling at the former sport utilizes a combination of intelligence, athletic ability, and talent that surpasses that of the latter.
I still love the gridiron game, but I have to admit that my appreciation for basketball has increased considerably after watching Love & Basketball (Gina Prince-Bythewood, 2000) and Glory Road (James Gartner, 2006).
I vaguely remember Gina Prince-Bythewood’s film being in the theatres. As it turns out, I was less familiar with its plot than I was with the film’s place in the year 2000. Prior to watching the film, I had not read up on what the film was about–I knew there was basketball and a romance subplot. I didn’t know that the lead female character would be playing ball too.
Written and directed by Prince-Bythewood, Love & Basketball follows Monica Wright (Sanaa Lathan) and Quincy McCall (Omar Epps) from childhood to early adulthood as they pursue their NBA dreams and grapple with the distractions and tensions commensurate with realizing their respective goals. The film is divided into four parts. It begins with Monica and Quincy as pre-teens (played by Kyla Pratt and Glenndon Chatman respectively), establishing how they first meet. She’s the new next-door neighbor and can play ball just as hard as he can.
The second, third, and fourth sections of the film focus on a different period of their lives. “Second Quarter” covers the 1988 basketball season at Crenshaw High School where Monica plays on the girls team and Quincy the boys. “Third Quarter” spans the 1988-1989 schoolyear at USC where Monica and Quincy also play basketball as freshmen. The “Fourth Quarter” looks at both characters’ lives in 1993; Monica has been playing for Spain for seven months and Quincy is recovering from a torn ACL injury he sustained while playing for the Lakers. The love component to the story manifests itself through Monica and Quincy as they realize that they mean more to each other than default friend.
In addition to developing the mutual attraction and affection between the two main characters, Prince-Bythewood’s film also uses this relationship to raise questions about gender roles and equality. Monica isn’t simply characterized as a tomboy or even slightly more athletic than her mother would like. She is feisty, temperamental, and a fighter. Quincy’s “personality” is less complex and functions more as a counterpart to Monica. In fact, as sports movies go, Love & Basketball virtually reverses the gender dynamics of its two primary student-athletes–at the very least, it assigns certain qualities typically associated with the (male) athlete to Monica rather than to Quincy.
For instance, the object of most sports films is to present a coming-of-age or redemption narrative by forcing its protagonist (an individual or a team) to learn the hard way how to succeed. Whoever is a bit too cocky, a bit too introverted, or a bit too unruly are all made to recognize and then relinquish or re-appropriate those characteristics. Along this journey, the protagonist must overcome obstacles and conflicts such as his own pride or fear as well as others’ critcisms.
Love & Basketball re-works this narrative pattern by offering cockiness and stubborness to Monica. She exhibits the attitude of an athlete who prioritizes the game above all else. Quincy, on the other hand, provides a contrast to that mentality by assuming somewhat of feminized position within their relationship. She is “better” at the game than he is; and while he still participates in archetypically male behavior (with female characters), the film is more interested in defining him in terms of or against his father, a former Clippers player (Dennis Haysbert) who proves to be a less than ideal role model. When the like-father-like-son mentality that Quincy had been carrying all his life suddenly fails to suffice, his insecurities become too much for him.
I would argue that Prince-Bythewood’s film is more about Monica and Quincy as individual basketball players one a thematic level. Furthermore, it is the way in which their lives play out on and off the court that builds and fuels the viewer’s concern. I’m not one to pull out the “F” word lightly, but I think it’s relevant here. From a narrative and ideological perspective, Love & Basketball can be considered a feminist film. That the film features a real high school (Crenshaw) that is known for its great girls and boys basketball teams and real USC women’s basketball players or that the story depicts Monica as more of the athlete (including being shouted at repeatedly by her USC coach) is just part of it.
I think the film has feminist undertones because it allows basketball to serve metaphorical purposes for Monica instead of Quincy. I don’t want to give away the last important scene in the film (or the film’s ending for that matter) because I really enjoyed Love & Basketball and highly recommend it. I will, however, say that the game means to Monica something that is usually associated with young males.
This film conveys the basketball-is-not-just-a-game message but through the eyes of a female. I’m sure some feminists would find it problematic that the film can’t tell this story without making Monica adopt a few male-athlete personality traits but I have no complaints. I don’t even mind the love thread–in the end, it works out better than I could have imagined. So go Netflix it or Blockbuster it today!
Originally posted at Sitting Pugs. To read about Glory Road, click here.
Monday, July 2, 2007
Sibling Incest in Film (spotlight on The House of Yes)
As I was looking into this concept, I was mildly surprised to find that it is not at all an uncommon theme in myth, literature, and cinema. Incest among siblings may be particularly relevant among fraternal twins of the opposite sex, where one could claim the bond is stronger. In Balinese culture, twins were forced to marry because of the assumption they had sex in the womb. Native American Mohave culture regards male-female twins as having been married in heaven (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twincest).
As incest is taboo in most cultures (though the definition varies), its’ revelation is always shocking and monstrous. It destabilizes social relations once it is no longer a secret. In the film Cruel Intentions, incest takes on a more sinister turn as it manifests a rivalry between two step-siblings (Ryan Philippe and Sarah Michelle Gellar). In Clueless, it is almost cute. In The Royal Tenebaums, Richie Tenebaum (Luke Wilson) is in love with his adopted sister Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow). We tentatively accept it in these cases, though finding it mildly scandalous, because of the lack of a blood relation.
Incest between siblings is also a fairly common concept in Japanese animation. In Revolutionary Girl Utena, members of an elite high school circle compete for possession of the mythical “Rose Bride.” In her incarnation as a high school student, the Rose Bride-- Anthy Himemiya-- engages in a semi-consensual incestuous relationship with her sexy, but dominating older brother Akio. He himself has a literally split personality, which expresses itself as two separate characters during the series. Anthy is torn between her long-standing duty to serve and to protect him and her unconventional love for her friend Utena.
The most well-known implication of an incestuous pairing is probably in Star Wars, where twins Luke and Leia develop a romantic attraction to each other prior to realizing that they are related. While there is definite sexual tension between them and even a kiss, it is replaced with filial affection once they both know the truth, and Leia herself becomes attracted to Han Solo before this fact is revealed, thereby conveniently avoiding tragedy.
In A.S. Byatt’s Angels and Insects, a Victorian naturalist marries the beautiful Eugenia of a rich family that has been his patron only to discover that she has been involved in a long-standing incestuous relationship with her brother which goes further than just incest, but also to inbreeding. All of her children are discovered to be those of her brother’s and Eugenia reveals that though she had tried and wanted to be normal and good, she was unable to put a stop to it.
Of course, all these examples invite the question—why? While incest implies a breakdown of normal, human relations at the most primal level, at the same time, it is primal in and of itself, and falls comfortably into Freud’s concept of the uncanny—“that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known and long familiar.” ("The Uncanny", p. 200). We are all attracted towards the familiar. Daphne du Maurier’s use of incest in her writing is related to the concept of “home” or the attraction towards that which is familiar, unconscious or not.
Perhaps the most compelling, clever, and layered use of it as a thematic device belongs to The House of Yes (Mark Waters, 1997), a film based on a play by Wendy MacLeod. The film adaptation is at once a gothic horror spoof, dark comedy, and historical reenactment—but mostly I feel that it operates with the precision of a Greek tragedy and the gut-wrenching emotional impact of Racine. The film stars Parker Posey as Jacqueline Pascal or “Jackie-O” and Josh Hamilton as Marty Pascal, reunited after an indeterminate period at Thanksgiving (during an unseasonable hurricane). Marty has brought home a fiancé, whom Jackie is meeting for the first time. During the course of the night, it is revealed that Marty and Jackie had been having sex with each other for a very long time. It probably began at age 14 with an Ides of March party in which they attended as John F. Kennedy and Jackie Onassis, as Posey's character relates, “in a pink Chanel suit, pillbox hat, and blood on my dress.” Posey, who herself has a twin brother twin in real life, owns the film. Her performance is visceral, frightening, and poignant.
On the day of the Ides of March party, the twins had invented a ritualistic game --a reenactment of the Kennedy assassination (in which Posey's character as Jackie Kennedy doubles as the killer), to enable them to break boundaries and to make love to each other (http://wendymacleod.com/plays/house_of_yes.shtml). Fraternal, opposite-sex twins are as close to each other as any man and woman can be. They are closer to each other than any friend or future significant other can be. That is somewhat tragic, because other women and men will always be sidelined (I’m not sure if I could be with a man who had a twin sister—I’d know I could not, nor would I want to, compete with that). This is of course not to say that all twins are incestuous because evidently the majority of them are not, but more to put the question out there: If they are already that close to each other, is sex between them really that shocking or unnatural? The twins’ mother tells Marty’s fiancé, “All I know for sure is that Marty and Jackie belong to each other.”
In the myth of Narcissus, our mythical Greek character is unable to come to terms with his own reflection, and drowns in it. Freud defines Narcissism as “unbounded self-love . . . which dominates the mind of the child and of the primitive man” (The Uncanny, p. 256). Jackie tells her twin, “Now you and I Marty, have a great deal in common: parents, DNA, bone structure.” Younger brother Anthony feigns being appalled by the revelation of their sexual liaison (though it’s clear that he himself always knew) and exclaims, “It’s like fucking a mirror!” In incestuous narcissism, according to Gail Finney, “erotic energy is transferred from the narcissistic individual to the object most like himself, his sibling.” (“Self-Reflexive Siblings: Incest as Narcissism in Tieck, Wagner, and Thomas Mann. The German Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 2, p. 243). Finney’s analysis concerns siblings Siegmund and Sieglinde in Richard Wagner’s “The Valkyrie,” in which the two find each other after a long period of separation. The attraction develops as they recognize the similarities in each other and they end up having sex. Sieglinde gives birth to Siegfreid, an iconic figure in Norse mythology. Finney writes, “Sieglinde realizes that only upon seeing Siegmund did she become fully conscious of herself. . . Siegmund is her mirror” (p. 247). In The House of Yes, Marty attempts to argue with his fiancé that sleeping with his sister is analogous to sleeping with himself.
Towards the end of the film, Jackie (in particular) and Marty both began to confuse the historical memory of Kennedy's death with their reenactment game, and with the departure of their own father 20 years ago on the same day. Jackie asks Marty to reenact the game with her one last time, promising to then restore him to the real of normalcy. The tragedy is that ultimately, Marty and Jackie’s relationship presents a crash of their world with the “normal” world and there is no room for reconciliation. Marty and Jackie are in love with each other and it’s not a love that can exist in the world outside of their own house. At the end, they are both aware of and confront and embrace this truth.
As incest is taboo in most cultures (though the definition varies), its’ revelation is always shocking and monstrous. It destabilizes social relations once it is no longer a secret. In the film Cruel Intentions, incest takes on a more sinister turn as it manifests a rivalry between two step-siblings (Ryan Philippe and Sarah Michelle Gellar). In Clueless, it is almost cute. In The Royal Tenebaums, Richie Tenebaum (Luke Wilson) is in love with his adopted sister Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow). We tentatively accept it in these cases, though finding it mildly scandalous, because of the lack of a blood relation.
Incest between siblings is also a fairly common concept in Japanese animation. In Revolutionary Girl Utena, members of an elite high school circle compete for possession of the mythical “Rose Bride.” In her incarnation as a high school student, the Rose Bride-- Anthy Himemiya-- engages in a semi-consensual incestuous relationship with her sexy, but dominating older brother Akio. He himself has a literally split personality, which expresses itself as two separate characters during the series. Anthy is torn between her long-standing duty to serve and to protect him and her unconventional love for her friend Utena.
The most well-known implication of an incestuous pairing is probably in Star Wars, where twins Luke and Leia develop a romantic attraction to each other prior to realizing that they are related. While there is definite sexual tension between them and even a kiss, it is replaced with filial affection once they both know the truth, and Leia herself becomes attracted to Han Solo before this fact is revealed, thereby conveniently avoiding tragedy.
In A.S. Byatt’s Angels and Insects, a Victorian naturalist marries the beautiful Eugenia of a rich family that has been his patron only to discover that she has been involved in a long-standing incestuous relationship with her brother which goes further than just incest, but also to inbreeding. All of her children are discovered to be those of her brother’s and Eugenia reveals that though she had tried and wanted to be normal and good, she was unable to put a stop to it.
Of course, all these examples invite the question—why? While incest implies a breakdown of normal, human relations at the most primal level, at the same time, it is primal in and of itself, and falls comfortably into Freud’s concept of the uncanny—“that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known and long familiar.” ("The Uncanny", p. 200). We are all attracted towards the familiar. Daphne du Maurier’s use of incest in her writing is related to the concept of “home” or the attraction towards that which is familiar, unconscious or not.
Perhaps the most compelling, clever, and layered use of it as a thematic device belongs to The House of Yes (Mark Waters, 1997), a film based on a play by Wendy MacLeod. The film adaptation is at once a gothic horror spoof, dark comedy, and historical reenactment—but mostly I feel that it operates with the precision of a Greek tragedy and the gut-wrenching emotional impact of Racine. The film stars Parker Posey as Jacqueline Pascal or “Jackie-O” and Josh Hamilton as Marty Pascal, reunited after an indeterminate period at Thanksgiving (during an unseasonable hurricane). Marty has brought home a fiancé, whom Jackie is meeting for the first time. During the course of the night, it is revealed that Marty and Jackie had been having sex with each other for a very long time. It probably began at age 14 with an Ides of March party in which they attended as John F. Kennedy and Jackie Onassis, as Posey's character relates, “in a pink Chanel suit, pillbox hat, and blood on my dress.” Posey, who herself has a twin brother twin in real life, owns the film. Her performance is visceral, frightening, and poignant.
On the day of the Ides of March party, the twins had invented a ritualistic game --a reenactment of the Kennedy assassination (in which Posey's character as Jackie Kennedy doubles as the killer), to enable them to break boundaries and to make love to each other (http://wendymacleod.com/plays/house_of_yes.shtml). Fraternal, opposite-sex twins are as close to each other as any man and woman can be. They are closer to each other than any friend or future significant other can be. That is somewhat tragic, because other women and men will always be sidelined (I’m not sure if I could be with a man who had a twin sister—I’d know I could not, nor would I want to, compete with that). This is of course not to say that all twins are incestuous because evidently the majority of them are not, but more to put the question out there: If they are already that close to each other, is sex between them really that shocking or unnatural? The twins’ mother tells Marty’s fiancé, “All I know for sure is that Marty and Jackie belong to each other.”
In the myth of Narcissus, our mythical Greek character is unable to come to terms with his own reflection, and drowns in it. Freud defines Narcissism as “unbounded self-love . . . which dominates the mind of the child and of the primitive man” (The Uncanny, p. 256). Jackie tells her twin, “Now you and I Marty, have a great deal in common: parents, DNA, bone structure.” Younger brother Anthony feigns being appalled by the revelation of their sexual liaison (though it’s clear that he himself always knew) and exclaims, “It’s like fucking a mirror!” In incestuous narcissism, according to Gail Finney, “erotic energy is transferred from the narcissistic individual to the object most like himself, his sibling.” (“Self-Reflexive Siblings: Incest as Narcissism in Tieck, Wagner, and Thomas Mann. The German Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 2, p. 243). Finney’s analysis concerns siblings Siegmund and Sieglinde in Richard Wagner’s “The Valkyrie,” in which the two find each other after a long period of separation. The attraction develops as they recognize the similarities in each other and they end up having sex. Sieglinde gives birth to Siegfreid, an iconic figure in Norse mythology. Finney writes, “Sieglinde realizes that only upon seeing Siegmund did she become fully conscious of herself. . . Siegmund is her mirror” (p. 247). In The House of Yes, Marty attempts to argue with his fiancé that sleeping with his sister is analogous to sleeping with himself.
Towards the end of the film, Jackie (in particular) and Marty both began to confuse the historical memory of Kennedy's death with their reenactment game, and with the departure of their own father 20 years ago on the same day. Jackie asks Marty to reenact the game with her one last time, promising to then restore him to the real of normalcy. The tragedy is that ultimately, Marty and Jackie’s relationship presents a crash of their world with the “normal” world and there is no room for reconciliation. Marty and Jackie are in love with each other and it’s not a love that can exist in the world outside of their own house. At the end, they are both aware of and confront and embrace this truth.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Outbreak Follow-up: Nature Revenge?
It's very likely that Outbreak was one of if not the first film to focus on an containing and dealing with an infectious disease on a global scale. A possible exception could be And the Band Played On (Roger Spottiswoode, 1993), a TV movie aired on HBO--based on Robert Shilts's book--about a group of doctors that identified the HIV virus.
Wolfgang Petersen is also responsible for helming films such as Das Boot (1981), The Neverending Story (1984), In the Line of Fire (1993), Air Force One (1997), The Perfect Storm (2000), Troy (2004) and Poseidon (2006). What do we have here? A WWII film about a German U-boat, a fantasy, a political thriller, an action-thriller involving a hijacked plane, an action film on the high seas based on a true story, an epic, and a remake of Ronald Neame's 1972 disaster film The Poseidon Adventure.
As David A. Cook explains in his book Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam 1970-1979, "the transformation of science fiction from B-genre into big-budget, special-effects laden spectacle was coincident with the rise of the disaster film, a closely related genre that originated in the 1970s and remains popular today. In disaster films, manmade systems failure or a force of nature, often monstrously perverted, threatens to destroy a group of characters brought together more or less by chance (as passengers on a jet or ocean liner, for example or vacationers at a resort), and while many of them die, a few prevail through their courge and resourcefulness" (251).
Outbreak possesses the same sense and scope of epic danger or peril as a disaster film, but can it be considered part of this genre under the guise of a nature-revenge disaster film? Think of all those films (of the 70s) where toxic waste has turned otherwise harmless fish, amphibians, and reptiles into swarms of killers.
If i were going to analyze Wolfgang Petersen's body of work in support of his being an auteur, I would probably try to make an argument that Outbreak does not lie outside the director's propensity for fear of impending doom that may or may not be inspired by real events. For instance, one could read Outbreak as a variation of the nature-revenge disaster film because it all "started" with a monkey that should never have been allowed to be illegally sold to a pet store in Califorina. Rather than the monkey ending up in a zoo and infecting other primates that then go on a killing rampage, the "revenge" is carried out through microscopic means from human to human (after the initial exposure from animal to human). Moral of the movie? None of this shipping cute animals from other countries to be pets in America. It's OK for zoos because they know how to take the proper precautions.
View the trailer of Outbreak:
A clip of And the Band Played On (I'm not sure if the Elton John song was in the original or not; I haven't found the trailer):
View image of Wolfgang Petersen:
http://images.usatoday.com/life/_photos/2006/05/11/petersen.jpg
View this post with all the pictures that were supposed to be included but couldn't be because I can't figure out how to make pictures appear where the cursor rests--here:
Sthemingway
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Outbreak: Ethical Questions for the Next Great Plague
YiQi asked me to write something about Outbreak. You might have heard of it. The film takes place in Africa where a dreadful disease could be the next great plague of humankind. There are naughty little monkeys in it....and Dustin Hoffman. I haven't seen it in a while, but to be honest, movies like that always make me cringe beause 1) That kind of thing probably would never happen and dramatizations are always so sensationalistic, and 2) I'm terrified of the off-chance that it could.The film, to my knowledge, was the first Hollywood attempt at discussing some tough issues related to national security and where the right for the healthy to survive supercedes that of the sick. Outbreak's timing was pretty important too... it came out about 6 years after the US had its own epidemic of Ebola, now known as Ebola Reston.
I was about 8 at the time, so I don't remember much about the mood of the nation or even how the media publicized the fact that the Ebola virus had been imported into the United States from the Phillipines via cynomolgus macaques and infected 12 people (thank you Tara's Ebola Site). The good news is that the version of Ebola the humans caught did not make them sick.
They say there are no atheists in fox holes and I tend to believe there are no atheist virologists. Say what you like, but the fact that the benign Ebola Reston and wicked Ebola Zaire are virtually indistinguishable under an electron microscope leads me to believe there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.
But Ebola's, ahem, fatal flaw is that the virus is exceedingly good at what it does. Ebola replicates too quickly and kills too quickly to have any real staying power. So it comes out every once in a while, takes lives, and goes back into hiding. Even the unfortunate tourist to catch the disease on safari and bring it outside of its natural habitat to Europe or somewhere else in Africa, so far, have not assended to Patient Zero status. They are usually ushered into a cold hospital room, quarantined as much as possible, and most often die.
Let's not forget, while we're talking about this that there are real people faced with the resurgence of this dreadful disease every day. They have lost loved ones to one of the most horrible deaths I can imagine. It's easy to talk about things in such a detached way, living in an industrialized country, as I do, where a victim would have a chance in hell to survive given our excellent acute and infectious disease care.
But Outbreak, and many other films after it, have raised an uncomfortable question about how we, as Americans may be asked to deal with a dreadful plague that could happen at any moment. Now more than ever, as we share airplane rides with patients infected with XDR-TB, clean up cruise ships from norovirus, and pray our spinach is safe from cattle and pig waste, we are keenly aware we may one day need to decide what should be done if an epidemic is serious and pervasive enough to threaten our homeland security.
Most people, when faced with the terrifying threat of your entire body (cells, tissues, organs and all) hemorraghing in one final bloody death shudder--see Richard Preston's Hot Zone--would probably say "Lock them up, kill them! I don't care, just don't let them near me!!"
And if that person clutching at life is your neighbor, your best friend, or your spouse? What then?
Sadly, the United States learned an awful lesson about humanity with the 1918 flu epidemic. Partly becuase Americans had no information about the disease, thanks to gag orders on the press by President Wilson and partly because people were literally dropping dead in the street, many ill people died because their friends and family members literally abandoned them to dehydration and starvation among other things (Thank you John Barry).
Mary Mallon, doomed forever to be known as "Typhoid Mary" never understood why she was forced to spend most of her life exiled to an island and publicly shamed for the deaths of her employers. Living in the late 19th and early 20th century, when even the greatest scientists had a limited understanding of typhoid, Mary couldn't comprehend how she could carry a disease that made people sick if she wasn't ill herself. Perhaps if her legacy has taught us anything, it's that the same moral obligations and concerns we have about genocide and slavery apply to how we treat victims of disease.
Is humankind really worth saving if we don't value human life? Is one life or a town of a hundred people worth potentially 10,000 of lives? Is the quick and painless death of an innocent at the hands of a well-meaning government, truly in the best interest of the people?
And if we are ever damned enough to one day look at spreading cases on a map and compare numbers with our vaccine or drug stockpile, we will have to ask ourselves the real questions--the ones where statistics and numbers are no longer a useful tool for calculation. Whose lives should we value? Should we save the weakest first, the children and the elderly? Or should we save the ones who know how to turn the lights back on and protect the public?
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