Queering the Pitch

Been doing some film editing lately. Watching HDTV, too, which sometimes exposes editors’ having gambled on a long shot being long enough that no one – at least at standard def – would notice that the actors’ lip movements don’t in the least correspond to the words on the soundtrack. Michel Chion says we want to marry voices to their sources, to see mouths. In this respect the tricks of facial orientation filmmakers use so that any words can be synched to an image track are a bit like the rhetoric of Nuts magazine cover photography, whereby breasts are angled or draped so that the nipples remain just out of sight, as if they were something impossible and fantastic. These images are meant to inspire in viewers a desire to warp the image plane or rearrange the body so that the hidden secret would be visible - a desire that, as Linda Williams notes, porn panders to by contorting performers according not to comfort or verisimilitude but a logic of ‘maximum visibility’ (Hardcore 48).

Increasingly, cheesecake photos employ Photoshop not merely to smooth over blemishes or reproportion bodies but to combine, Zeuxis-style, elements from multiple photos, a process that is often taken to the point of defying conventional anatomy. Synthetic cubism is one reference point, but I was also reminded of these bodies in the Tate’s recent Gaugin show. One of the nice thinks about showing his carvings and ceramics alongside the paintings is that you realise the latter look not merely spatially ‘off’ but as if pictorial space was a sort of resistant material with its own obstinate grain or torque, only partially malleable into the forms Gaugin wants it to assume.

As the earliest artist yet to be exhibited at Tate II, part of the show’s remit was to argue for Gaugin’s importance to later, modern-er art. Certainly, the extent to which he allows desire to deform virtual space marks him as an ancestor of recent painters (Kilimnick, Joffe, Peyton et al) who’ve sought to reproduce the dissipated or decadent styles of attention characteristic of fan art – in which ‘good bits’ might be larger or more worked up while blurrings or disconnections, lapses in concentration and spots of boredom, sully other parts of the image/experience.

Those works (that is, both the fans’ stuff and that of the painters reflexively cribbing their style) tend, of course, to be based on prior images that, translated through fans’ desiring, variably co-ordinated or skilled bodies, come out distorted, sometimes unrecognizably. At the same moment as Gaugin was sailing to the tropics Michael Field (the alias of ‘poets & lovers’ Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) was working on Sight & Song, a poetic ‘translation’ of some of the pair’s favourite paintings. According to Ana Parejo Vadillo the collection operates according to a ‘two-phased aesthetic’ (Passengers of Modernity 192): the poems offer ‘objective’ descriptions of the images before submitting them to subjective, often sexualized re-readings. What Vadillo doesn’t comment on is the frequency with which these re-readings involve recalibrating the spatial relationships between the bodies that the pictures represent.

Often these shifts seem dictated by the poets’ own ‘orientation’ in gender/sexuality terms: a couple of the poems (including one on Boticelli’s Prima, of which Gaugin’s Nave Nave Mahana migh be read as a softcore remake) position us within the pictorial space occupied by female models, so that left and right are reversed (or ‘inverted’ – as Victorians said of homosexuals). Others trace sightlines that put female bodies squarely in the way of female eyes – eyes that, cued by Field, it is easy to read as harbouring an other-than-Platonic intent.

Of course, I’m probably doing unto Field what they’ve done unto Tintoretto, Giorgione et al: warping the original in the hope of teasing out a latent sexual secret. Nonetheless, their ‘two-phase’ translations of 2D canvases into space of utopian possbility remains intriguing as an instance of viewers interacting with and realigning images and bodies in order to realise multiple, competing storylines.

It might seem fanciful or trite to compare this to the process of playing a videogame, but I think its legitimate – especially in the case of games like Fez or Paper Mario, where progress often entails a form of perceptual ‘frame-shifting’, a switch between reading forms as 2D or 3D – just as, by imagining the males in Tintoretto's The Rescue occupy a different picture plane, we can choose to see the newly-liberated female captive gazing not at her (male) emancipator but at the body of the woman in the centre of the boat.

This game is a bit like looking at the duckrabbit, the famous emblem of epistemological relativism that can be seen either as a quacking duck or a windblown bunny, but not as both simultaneously (see also those images of preening coquetttes who turn into beshawled and decrepit crones). Re-reading the bit in Proust where Charlus is introduced for an upcoming book group, I was struck by the idea that there might be readers who wouldn’t yet know about the character’s (or, for that matter, the author’s) sexual orientation. Could you read (what now seemed to be) such an absurdly innuendo-saturated account of the character and come out of it blithely convinced he was straight?

Both Fez and Paper Mario have cartoony visual styles that riff on the videogame's transition from sprites to polygons, speaking to an audience old enough to have had to use their imaginations to ‘fill out’ games’ pixel-flat worlds. But there’s no reason games with similar mechanics couldn’t adopt entirely different aesthetics or communicate other messages.

The photographer Matt Stuart takes pictures that (a bit like the Elstir paintings Proust describes, also in vol. II) are angled so as to produce bizarre trompe l’oeil conjunctions. While I don’t really like his images (I’m turned of by the way they render the world wondrous and then knowable, dazzling their viewers by transforming ‘everyday’ London into a spectacular space rich with human variety, romance and humour and then flattering them by allowing them to decode and master this initially puzzling plurality) they are, in a way, games and suggestive as such of the potential for forms of visual play based on opening contingent arrangements of forms and bodies onto new meanings.

Voices Off

So my recourse, in spells of emotional turmoil, is to media occupying two opposed registers: on the one hand, macho or machinic music that denies the possibility of emotion/affect (excepting aggression, obvs); on the other, stately, hyperbolically tragical stuff – chansons, melodrama, Veronika Voss. Basically I’ve been listening to a lot of D Double E and a lot of Cale-era Nico lately. As a consequence I’ve been thinking a lot about how voices affect me.

Michel Chion differentiates three modes of listening: causal, semantic and reduced. Causal listening is the level at which we class sounds as (coming from) machines, larynxes, birds, middle-aged Latina females, grime MCs etc. (our hypotheses can be wrong, of course). Taking D Double, the level on which I ‘get’ “think you’re a big boy cos you’ve got a beard/ bullets’ll make your face look weird” is semantic, but the line works musically because of his bizarre torsion of the vowels – perceptible at the level of reduced listening. D Double E gets away with his signature line being ‘it’s me’ because no one else says me like him; he seems to have total control over the production of the sorts of sounds you’d usually associate with vexed inarticulacy. Of course, the three aren’t really separable; what I’ve deduced or supposed about a voice will inflect my interpretation of what it says. I can find this girl’s ‘R’ sounds* fascinating as the residue of a Notts accent’s all-but-totally successful erasure (with that erasure’s attendant class connotations) but also gorgeous all on their dull, frictive own. Nico’s arcane, obstructively mispronounced lyrics kind of don’t matter because they’re the occasion for her to make sounds, though their gamey magniloquence also adds something to the experience.**

Barthes’ term for the irrefutable je ne sais quoi certain singers/vocal artefacts possess is ‘grain’ (which, given my general preference for trebly and sobbing voices over husky and raspy ones, I’ve never much liked as a descriptor). Naomi Schor suggests that we can find the co-ordinates for a Barthesian aesthetics in those aspects of each medium which seem, for Barthes, to represent its irreducible – and irrecuperable – essence: the ‘punctum’ in photography, the obtuse in film, the haiku-esque mode of textual statement that ‘instead of insisting ‘we are the real’... merely announces ‘so’’ (Schor 89). ‘Grain’ – which Schor doesn’t, incidentally, mention - would seem to be the sonic equivalent.

But are these qualities always contingent and/or irrecuperable? Barthes says yes: escaping/exceeding intention and meaning, they can’t be synthesised or produced (Joss Stone signifies without possessing the granular quality proper to proper soul?). Nevertheless, once they’ve happened they command our attention – which is a very valuable commodity. In an essay I recently read (which has transformed my experience of looking at go-see polaroids – something that, as a consequence of my guilty fascination with the fashion industry, is something I actually do a fair bit of), Elizabeth Wissinger talks about fashion models’ role as amplifiers or transducers of affect.

Challenging the traditional supposition that fashion photography is about embodying culturally valorized archetypes, she suggests that the best models/images may be precisely those that mobilise confusion and irresolution, creating expressions/conjunctions that are ‘unexpected... unassimilable... beyond the borders of conventional interpretation.’ A pre-expressive attitude – a face that could be about to resolve into an expression of joy, or ire or sulkiness but is, right now, suggestively illegible – is what the fashion shoot aims to produce/record/transmit.

As such, looking totally punk, or all-American – or, for that matter, looking ‘womanly’/‘sexy’ - isn’t necessarily as lucrative, as durably recuperable, as being able to negotiate the space between definable attitudes and aesthetics (I’ve written elsewhere about how, when Chantal Joffe gets it right, her paintings suggest the proximity of sexily compelling poses/expressions to poses/expressions symptomatic of boredom, panic or foetal alcohol syndrome). The same’s arguably true of voices; while studies suggest that different accents and dialects connote different qualities, signifying for the majority of us as posh, kind, stupid, trustworthy or whatever, voices that are mongrel, or grating, unpredictable or texturally compelling have a capacity to levy attention more to do with reduced listening than with our cultural biases.

Chion uses another term – ‘MSIs’ or ‘materializing sound indices’, ‘qualities of sound that direct our attention to the physical nature of its source’ – that suggests something both about the character of sounds that move us, and the reason they do (weirdly I’m thinking here of the tiny breathless hitch with which the beardy-sounding voice of hhWickes inaugurates his pronunciation of that brand name, also of how abnormally high in the mix Elly Jackson’s vocals tend to be, and how well this serves her raw novitiate schtick); you kind of hear these sounds with your musculature and pallette as much as your brain, they act on you physically, on account of their reference back to their production. Maybe, at points where I’m not really keen on where cognition and memory tend to be taking me, its the capacity of these voices to override the semantic that’s so appealing. Certainly I’m going to give Undeniable – feat. an uncharacteristically sweet-natured D Double vocal – another spin.

*(‘uvular rhotics’, I think they’re called – interestingly Keita Takahashi just called his new company uvula because he was struck by the contrast between the (to him, meaningless) English word’s sound, and its ‘disgusting’ Japanese significance)

**Here we’re up already against the gendered sound/meaning opposition whereby women are identified with formless babble, men with syntactic sense – an opposition psychoanalytic feminism has read as a male attempt to disavow the phase when the bouncing baby boy was dependent on the instructive maternal voice. Music has repeatedly been seen as ‘dangerous’ because it subordinates the signifying function of the voice to emotive/aesthetic imperatives. Dudes finding foreign chicks’ botches cute and the quasi-toddlerish extended sibilants currently voguish among hipster girls suggest this same libidinally invested preference for female speech to be infantile/ornamental/purely sonorous – a charge the paragraph this note’s appended to could be convicted of pretty easily too.

***It also suggests the phenomenon’s similarity to the operation of MSG, which (I’m told) activates so many disparate tastebuds simultaneously that the body asks for another helping in the hope of getting a better handle on what’s going on.

Outside the Box

Making good on the early promise of Jaws 3 and that one level in Earthworm Jim 2 where you could wear threedee goggles, everyone from Pixar to Sony to Dazed and Confused is all about creating stereoscopic depth-of-field fx these days. Prizing 'immersion' and lauding fictions/characters for their 'depth' is so commonplace in discussions of books, movies, telly and games that the entertainment industry's desire to literalise those tags is understadable. Not everyone's so big on interiority and volume though; I've been reviewing a lot of gay cinema lately that taps (consciously or not) into a venerable tradition of challenging 'depth > surface' prejudices and queering spaces, whether by incorporating 2D animation & obvious green screen stuff or by peopling films with defiantly puddle-deep caricatures.

It's gotten me interested in films that think seriously about how cinema uses 2D pictures (1440 of them each minute) to create an illusion of 3D space, in stuff like La Jetee and Funeral Parade of Roses, the photo-scanning thing in Bladerunner and the hero of Blow Up trying to make sense of a space/event by pinning photos up around a white-walled open-plan studio. I just watched Herzog's Nosferatu, which - as a remake of an old film about a reanimated corpse - is all about cinema's status as (pace Laura Mulvey) 'death 24x a second.' It opens with a handheld camera moving across a line of dessicated bodies that, thanks to the organic unsteadiness of the camera operator's hand, occasionally seem uncannily vital (usage of the word 'uncanny' is, of course, advised here; the film's chock-full of phenomena Freud catalogues in his perennially-cited piece on Hoffmann and unheimlichkeit). Though I'm sure there'll be all sorts of revealing self-referentialities in upcoming 3D movies, it'll probably be a while before any film makers who're concerned with what the medium is/does can afford to use this tech - which raises a weird issue; Kojima's spent most his career as videogame designer making it clear he wanted to make movies, but it's possible film makers will discover they've a lot to learn from stuff like Goichi Suda' Killer 7 when it comes to doing 3D meaning-making and storytelling.

Of course, the people/objects that come out of the screen will only be telepresent, intangible and odourless (a recent radio ad for a teleconferencing company lists bogus stats regarding how many business people don't wash their hands, shower etc.). Although Sadako crawls out of the telly in Ringu she doesn't lay a finger on her victims, staring them to death instead. Teletactility is technically possible, but (as Vivian Sobchack's discussed) cinema induces tactile sensations in viewers already, and perhaps audiences don't want movies to be more-than-metaphorically 'touching.' I've been making a lot of pictures with chewing gum lately. It lends an ickily material and intimate dimension (and, of course, a literal dimension, a Z axis) to flat, idealised images, especially in the era of Swine flu-induced salivaphobia. It smells nice too.

(Dazed cover from here, gummed Velasquez mine, Sadako from here, M.B.V.3.D. poster here, liquidisation of circa 1960s social convention via camera here, late Dreamcast game resembling aforementioned here, dead Hatshepsut here)

Boys 'n' Beasts

I don't see that many films in cinemas these days but somehow in 2008 I managed to catch both Mama Mia and Indiana Jones IV. Each was compellingly bad in its own special way, but they also had a dynamic in common agewise, pitching infantile, dull, irremediably pussified 20somethings against age 50/60ish actors who got to be wryly sage and exude dog-eared but 100% authentic charisma and moxy and get finally wed at the end. I guess it's a smart move to target a generation of moviegoers who for reasons of disposable income and net-illiteracy and misc. other demographic factors are much more likely to pick up (or be bought) the DVD/soundtrack CD/tied-in products.

So last nite I saw Looking For Eric, which also has a hero of a certain age - a postal worker who, under the tutelage of le King, finds within himself reserves of hitherto-untapped courage and facility etc.

I was struck by how far it followed the Totoro/Beethoven/Free Willy/E.T. 'kid meets creature which over the course of their necessarily and tear-jerkingly brief association teaches them key life lessons' paradigm. It's an evergreen model Fumito Ueda's upcoming PS3 game looks to be following, but having a grandparent in the role of the boy and a Gallic centre-forward (albeit a very creaturely, hirsute and kind of Totoro-esque one) as his figmental buddy put a different spin on it. While the movie kinda falls into the trap of painting women as saintly & innately forgiving if not especially au fait with life's grizzlier realities, what's more interesting is the way it transvalues the corresponding model of manhood - i.e. that men are outsize, incurably solipsistic kids.

It's pretty positive about a number of 'male' traits and behaviours - cultivating specialist knowledge, gadgetary aptitude, hero-worship, pack-style communality, mischief - that are normally seen as sad and suggestive of arrested development. Loach both allows Cantona to come across as all-but ad absurdum masculine and as an embodiment of humility, generosity, team spirit, improvisatory flair and acceptance of flux. As in one Corinthians thirteen, understanding as a man instead of a child = acknowledging you only ever see as through a glass, darkly, and should as such cultivate Loachly, bro'ly agape. I totally got choked up in a slightly socialistically-inflected version of the proper response to impossible kid/creature love story movies.

(Totoro from here, Trumpetting Eric from here, Ueda boy & griffin from here)

What the Odds Are

Lost my wallet last week. Does things' being irrevocably gone seem more freakish & unjust given how replaceable/recoverable/immaterial so many things are circa e-capitalism? I realised I felt on some level aggrieved at there being no text field I could type 'wallet' into like I'd do w/ a misplaced file in my hard drive or locating a pub to conduct a date in...

Always found interesting celebrity's basis in proliferation & ubiquity, as in not just the circulation of productions, merchandise, accounts and images but also the shuttling of the people in question across timezones & places (in one capital & Balenciaga tuesday, another & Junya Watanabe Thursday nevertheless on red carpetting & reprising a pose) so that it becomes an almost incredible coincidence you'd be spatiotemporally proximate (even if you've paid, say for a gigticket, to be so - & hence fans' OMFG!ing & spazz-outs). There's a kind of eggs-in-one-basket-averse logic that's touchingly close to pharaohs commissioning statues covered in inobliterably deep-graven cartouches as insurance against their souls being left homeless -tho now its about mobility rather than monumentality, quitting the White house to conduct nuclear war from the presidential doomsday plane etc.

The star/fan dynamic, its radical assymetry (the amount of geographical, neural, discursive space celebrities monopolise, how they can't be expected to invest imaginatively or emotionally at all in people who whether idly or trulymadlydeeply do in them) has - as an erstwhile mopily pretentious suburban teen for whom being a fan of devout fans (Richey Edwards, pre-solo Morissey w/ his fondness for Wilde, who once strewed Bernhardt's vector off a Folkestone ferry with lillies) was central, self-fashioningwise - always fascinated me.

Paul Virilio's (in The Aesthetics of Absence) great on Howard Hughes' 'taste for ubiquitous absence,' his deploying his wealth first to become inordinately visible, then to disappear, always keeping prospective re-appearance up his sleeve (H.H. reputedly 'supported, at great expense, a harem' that he never visited, it being 'enough to know that he had the power of going there & the young women whose pictures he had were awaiting his arrival').

Common to the visible/invisible eras, Virilio argues, is Hughes' desire to be everywhere/nowhere (same diffs) that was expressed through attempts to homogenize space, first via media exposure, aeronautics, global circumnavigation speed records (which kinda = taking playboy globetrotting/jetsetting to the nth degree) then by living alone, nude & becysted in 'rooms... narrow & all alike, even if they are worlds apart' with screeens showing his movies in lieu of windows ('the windows were all shaded and the sunlight could no more penetrate... than the unanticipated image of a different landscape... suppressing all uncertainty, Hughes could believe himself everywhere & nowhere, yesterday & tomorrow, since all points of reference to astronomical space or time were eliminated').

Its w/ reference to the visible-invisible parabola Virilio says Christ is 'the inverse of Hughes,' tho its true in a more fundamental way; Elaine Scarry's said its very possible to miss how boggled by J.C.'s thereness, his amenability to being seen and spoken, people in the gospels get; in contrast to the omniscience/-presence of Jehova (who tautologically am the great I am), Jesus' 'predicative generosity' means 'consent to be at a given moment confined by some attribute... to be, though everywhere, apprehensible at every given moment as only somewhere rather than everywhere.'

While on a deistic tip, I love fan-art - of which one-time celluloid Hughes Leo Di Cappie has occasioned his fair share - for that religiosity porn also often has. Hence the violation of the above otherwise tonally harmonious collage w/ some pencillings of total baldwin Channing Tatum.

(autistically detailed tatum from here, monochrome hatshepsut here, teenyboppers here, Giottan J.C. & co. here, Caravaggian J.C. & co. here)

Tacit Snow

As an appendix to an earlier post plus an aperitivo for forthcoming attractions, saw Queen Christina the other weekend, wherein Garbo, gazing mesmerized out a window, mutters 'the snow is like a white sea, one could go out & be lost in it... and forget the world' while the audience - who has no visual access to the snowfield - gazes mesmerized at the gazing b/w Garbo's face's snowy surfaces & declivities. Not sure I've seen her in anything else but she's amazingly magnetic for the film's entirety - tho pretty much everyone else is formidably hammy & stilted, which could account for it.

(Garbo lapped by all-but Pughesque collar from here)

o'er 'n' about

Just read about the great Disney rotoscoping scandal, which reminded me of (the also-rotoscoped) Waltz with Bashir. As with the g.d.r.s. - which people've carped has marred & bespoiled their childhoods etc. - rotoscoping in Bashir functions to suggest the difficulty of identifying w/ alien people, eras and experiences (including one's own past). Layering, overwriting and filtering, which techniques I've incidentally been lately mucking about with as I teach myself Photoshop, constitute both Bashir's subject (it's about protagonist/director Ari Folman's attempt to recover his own psychically-suppressed wartime biography) and its methodology. Besides metaphorising the soldiers' modes of parsing the horrible stuff they have to see & perpetrate, the overlaid animation stops the representation of war being too pornographically grimy or schmaltzily exploitative. Right at the end Folman deploys a couple of minutes of archive footage, footage which he's both 'earned' the right to use and schooled the viewer to (better) understand over the course of the movie.

The film capitalises on the uncanniness and increased ambiguity of rotoscoped faces. The way interviewees move, fidget, unconsciously itch their noses etc. makes it clear they're real, but the rotoscoping frustrates the viewer's impulse to look for evidence of what being in a war does to someone on their face or in their eyes. Freud (L. Freud, that is) has talked about the necessity - when painting nudes - of treating the head as another limb, Deleuze of the difference between head and face, & these nearly-faces blur that line, showing that while cartoons tend to be unambiguously hyper-expressive, they can also be eerily inscrutable. Obvs this is especially true of comic books, what w/ their being static & mute. Having recently done my culturally mandated reading of Watchmen and checked out From Hell too I'm suitably wowed by how Moore and his collaborators exploit comics' formal features to whodunnit &/or whydunnit ends.

Still haven't managed to see the celluloid Watchmen. Maybe what I'm most curious about is if/how it'll handle the bit where they relate Dr. Manhattan's biography after he decamps to Mars . The fact the narrative's related via still images distributed on a page is exploited to super-dazzling effect in this issue. Dr. Manhattan's an erstwhile mild-mannered physicist who, due to the drastically nuclear complications of an experiment, exists in a privileged relation to space, time and matter (past/present/future an open book, teleportation & the manipulation of reality's constituent atoms no problem etc.). The character's reminiscing, in part on account of a polaroid he's found, and the reader's meanwhile being filled in on his backstory, laid out in achronologically sequenced panels between which dense & various relations of causality and coincedence obtain (the book's very much about humanity's pattern-recognition/-formation capacities & their potential to redeem or damn us - hence Rorschach*). The visual rhymes, echoes, ironies etc. would survive the transition to cinema, but suspending stills against a white page's vacuum turns out to be such an effective way of conveying outer space's inert airlessness, the character's scrambled temporality & the fact that Merleau-Ponty's contention that

'the multiplicity of points or 'heres' can in the nature of things be constituted only by a chain of experiences in which on each occasion one and no more of them is presented as an object, & which itself is built up in the heart of this space. And, finally, far from my body's being for me no more than a fragment of space, there would be no space at all for me if I had no body'

doesn't hold as true as it ought for him that I can't really imagine a movie treatment matching up...

(vulpine nuptials from here, pensive Folman here, pensive blue nudity here)

*sort of also what this blog's about; the pretty much all-surpassing and occasionally pernicious pleasure I acquire from tracing/recognising/asserting however-arbitrary linkages and associations between things