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

Vermoulu

Just read, via Steve Baker's The Postmodern Animal, about Helen Mayer Harrison and John Harrison's project Casting a Green Net: Can It Be We Are Seeing a Dragon? which saw the two artists delimiting an area of the Pennines bounded by the Humber, the Mersey and misc. Roman roads in order to consider cultural and ecological interlinkages within it. Only when they'd set these bounds did they find they'd outlined a dragon. Wilfuly hallucinated out of OS maps, the Harrisons' dragon - with its two marigold wings and beaked profile - is illustrated above, as are a couple  of AGF's even more Rorschach-y blot-dragons. It's kind of like the woman-shaped map in Rider Haggard's She (with regard to which, transposed into a chic Gallic electro register, this too).

Dragons, as the mapping of one onto (or maybs the discovery of one within) the Pennines suggests, are instruments of territorialization and deterritorialization. Always occupying as-yet unmapped frontiers  (hence 'here be dragons' plus also 'It Came from Outer Space') they embody the negotiation of borders - between places, between species, between the real and imaginary. AGF's Dancefloor Drachen - the LP which the inkblot dragons were produced to illustrate - is about digital property, about modes of acquiring and altering others' music in an age when bricks&mortar pressing plants & record shops are increasingly superfluous, and is as such preoccupied with shifting boundaries. 

As with giants and Krakens, dragons speak to a kind of animistic need to imagine animals on the same scale as the landscape, who are or at least are able to shape that landscape, animals the forms of which are suggested in rockfaces and bunched clouds - hence the Rorschachiness of AGF's and the Harrisons' dragons.  Also pictured above is a plastic dragon-islet playset which I owned as a kid that opened up and had a smaller dragon in it. Pictured too is Shadow of the Colossus, a recent, deeply melancholy videogame where you kill 16 behemoths that turn, dead, to piles of mossy rubble which look from the right angle like like the monsters they used to be pre-ossification. The game takes some design cues* from the earlier Panzer Dragoon Saga, wherein you rode a dragon over ruins and deserts. One of the interesting things in Panzer was the dragon's malleability; there's three images above of the screen where you moved a cursor between 4 points in order to genetically reconfigure your mount in real-time. Aspects of the dragon would evoke a rhino, a narwhal, a cricket, a gecko, an egrit without its ever looking entirely like any of them, or even like a straightforward chimera-like composite. 

Reading Baker grapple with Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'becoming-animal'  - which has to do with creating new, contingent combinations of attributes, with multiplicity and metamorphosis, 'deterritorialization' and the liquidation of known boundaries -  reminded me of this facet of the game. Becoming, in the Deleuzo-Guattarian sense, is not a matter of A turning into B or A + B turning into C but of perpetual, indefinable flux (nothing is and nothing becomes; everything is becoming) and  'becoming-dragon' is no more or less viable than 'becoming-antelope.'  As often w/ Deleuze, its an attractive idea insofar as it gets close to something of the way I find I think or intake stuff. I spent the lengthy tail-end of a recent party propped up frazzledly watching maybe 4 hours worth of Planet Earth, hours which are only now imperfectly recoverable - so that while there's odd gestures or textures or images that've stayed with me I can't, for example, say just what species the animal that tore out a long, red shoehorn of inner neck from another animal on a pebbled, spumy shore was - I've just a sense of scattering, slickness and blubber, mingled somehow w/ tactile data from the bubblewrap on the fancy-dress costume of the girl sat next me. The emotional residue smacks a bit of being a kid, back when it was okay to imagine or credulously read about or draw up dragons.

 

 

*not to mention its mood (which is that sort of bereft, coastally-salty bleakness you get in Old English poetry) plus a taste for portentous Engrish titles

(AGF's dragons from her website, poemproducer, worth-seeing-in-motion dragon morphing from this vid, Dune-y colossus from here, OS map dragon from Steve Baker's The Postmodern Animal, dragon islet from here)

Implicit/Allusive Spoilers OR 'like wet gloves they bobbed and shone til he sluiced/ Them out on the dunghill, glossy and dead'

Firstly, it's conceivable that Bale's intentionally channeling a certain puppyfat-prone midfield ace in The Prestige right? With his inanely boyish grin and estuary vowels? The movie deployed pretty much every key fin de siecle gothic trope (live burial, orientalism, dopplegangers, fragmentary journals, science and/science as magic, the gaslit pursuit of incognito gentlemen by incognito gentlemen over Eastcheap cobbles*) but in a deft and intelligent way. Its spin on the gothic idea of the selves we're obligated to murder in order to attain the condition of civilization (the actual unattainability of which ideal means the murder has to daily re-occur) was pretty chilling/affecting/effective, and as evocative of the 1970s/80s sci/bio-fi gothic of  Alien, The Thing or Bladerunner as it was Jekyll, Dorian or Dracula (it's a movie almost as preoccupied w/ parthenogenesis as Alien 4). Even ScarJo's bungled UK English isn't that excruciating.

The sense you're left with of lives stunted or wasted, of selves expensively, performatively dissembled, made me think of Judith Butler's notion of 'heterosexual melancholy' - straight culture's disavowed sorrow over the people we're required not to be &/or love. On another tack, kinda weird that Hugh Jackman's dandified stage-magician turn might have inspired this year's bizarre, razzledazzle-y Oscars format tho isn't it?

*Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's argued that a 'tableau of two men chasing one another across a landscape' is central to Frankenstein in particular and Victorian gothic in general. Pretty much The Thing's entire cocktail of bromantically tinged & paranoiac macho rivalry, icy climes, monstrosity and science is cribbed directly from Shelley.

(Kurt, hirsute and investigating, is from here, Lampsesque bale here, Frankencrevasse here, Frankenhug (w/ Drogba) here)

Equine Pathos II: The Verbinskining

I've previously talked a) about how much I enjoyed Ring and b) about equine pathos (whereby the portrayal of horses being injured is used to lend stories tragicky spiritualistic heft). Well, just saw the American version of Ring, the which I'd fully expected to be bad for reasons of innate anti-Hollywood snootiness plus because Gore Verbinski's next film was Pirates of the Caribbean, which I still find so incongruous that I call bullshit on my brain whenever it reminds me of the fact and have to aiemdeebee it. It was pretty fun self-righteously hand wringing about the badness of it all and I'd been happily shooting fish (wise-beyond-his-years kid who makes spooky crayon drawings - pow! -  superfluous Naomi Watts underwear shot w/in five minutes - kablam! -  switching the male character from an academic to a brodaciously grungey camera op - doosh! and etc.) for over an hour when THIS came along, nudging the whole enterprise into a world of actually kinda valiant badness I'll admit I hadn't banked on (**SPOILER/question** can you ever bank on a horse threshed by a ferry rudder?). So hats off, Gore.