Tuesday, June 17, 2008

The Truth About the Wonderful Prospect


I thought interested parties might like to check out this interview with Werner Herzog on Gothamist where he talks about Encounters at the End of the World, and blows the lid off the rumors about his remaking Bad Lieutenant . Below is my favorite excerpt:

True, much of it is very funny but what stuck with me most at the end are the sublime aspects of it. The latter part, where you get the sounds of the seals and the underwater footage, to me they suggest not just otherworldliness, but a divine intelligence. Do you agree? Are you trying to persuade me to become an adherent of creationism?

Not necessarily, but to me the sounds of the seals, for instance, suggests something supernatural. No, it doesn’t. It only suggests the sounds, and they are wonderful and sublime. I wouldn’t read anything God-like into it. However, creation itself, as it is, has something magnificent, and the film celebrates it, the film names it, the films shows it. And the film ends like that. And I like this notion; you do not often have a chance in a movie to show things that are of utmost beauty, and of course the music has a big part in showing a certain sacredness in what we have in front of us.

Also head over to American/Mexican for Natasha's take on the Moving Image Source event we both worked very hard drinking wine at.

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Movie this Monday

With all the summer fun that's going on don't forget to come to Heathers Bar this Monday for Shadow of a Doubt. The movie is 108 min long and starts increasingly-not-so-promptly at 7pm. Heathers is located on 13th St btw A & B, and here's a map if you need one. Screenings are always free, but come prepared to buy a drink or two from the bar to support Heathers.

Monday, June 9, 2008

What's In the Hearts of Men

Last week I had the opportunity to meet one of my idols. An opportunity I totally balked at, of course, because I couldn’t come up with anything to say to him. Anything other than to tell him that a recent episode of Metalocalypse referenced Fitzcarraldo, and Cary Jones fed that to me. Anything that came straight from my heart, from what I really felt, would sound too gushing to be sincere. ‘Werner Herzog you are the most brilliant filmmaker, the most daring creative force walking this planet. Everything you say about cinema is exactly what I feel.’ He even left Jonathan Demme a little star struck in the clip I’ve linked to. The only fitting tribute to Werner Herzog and his grand cinematic vision was a totally unintentional one. While we assembled to hear a man who has moved mountains for movies (and boats across them) a man who has grappled with humanity’s alienation from the earth, God, and his own often alien society, another man, (less poetically the second of the day) scaled the exterior of the 52 story Times Building where we waited in the basement auditorium. I would climb a building for Werner Herzog, but I chose three glasses of free wine instead.

As usual everything Herzog said was the perfect combination of bananas, brilliance and poetry. He told Demme “I know what’s in the hearts of men.” Then he told a story about recording interviews for Wild Blue Yonder wherein he entered a room full of astronauts who seemed a bit standoffish. He looked around and then told them about growing up in the mountains of Bavaria and how he became very adept at milking cows. Every since then he could always pick out a man who could milk a cow by looking at his face. He pointed at one man and declared ‘you, sir, know how to milk a cow!’ which was true. He told Demme that to be a filmmaker you must know what is in the hearts of men, and know what frightens them.

Of most interest to me were his thoughts on what is becoming a running theme of this blog. Herzog declared “If you don’t understand how to collaborate you’ll never understand the real essence of moviemaking.” Werner Herzog is a poet (and I don’t bestow that lightly or without a bit of irony, however it cannot be denied that the man has a way with language and a sense of drama like none other) of singular vision, and he makes more than liberal use of the poetic license that comes along with the title. Nevertheless, no matter how much truth is stretched, no matter how much embellishment is added or midgets enlisted to portray the human struggle, Herzog is a man who has worked intimately with some great and famously difficult artists in their own right, Klaus Kinski being the most famously infamous. During his talk with Demme, Herzog told of his collaboration with musician Florian Fricke (until he discovered New Age music later in life, and Herzog let him go his own way, b/c that kind of music is not to Dear Werner’s liking) and his years working with Peter Zeitlinger, a cinematographer on nearly 10 (or possibly 17—Herzog said that number but I can’t corroborate that) films. Filmmaking is an art that involves the most amount of industry and consequently the most cooperation between artists of varying fields. Where collaboration can dilute an artistic vision, where it can corrupt what makes something special about an idiosyncratic visual artist or author, as Herzog states, to truly be a filmmaker you must be someone who will allow collaboration to broaden a vision. Great directors or writers or editors to blossom under the pressures of cooperation by focus most on their strongest skills, relying on what makes their vision singular and what that brings to an artistic endeavor as massive as a move. Despite, or perhaps because of his passion for music, when working with a great musician Herzog told Demme that he sits in the same room as someone like Fricke, but just to inhabit the space, to feel the creativity, but was adamant that ‘his world is his world’ and Herzog stays, in the same room, but in a world of his own. Rather than controlling another’s vision, Herzog finds inspiration in chance and the things that ‘fall into his lap.’

Ostensibly the night was in celebration of the launch of The Museum of the Moving Image’s new web resource, the Moving Image Source. When Demme posed a question about YouTube (‘too small and quick’ for Herzog’s liking) and upped his hipster cred by name-dropping Dan Deacon, Herzog paid delightful tribute to my former employer. Herzog declared that with the launch of the Moving Image Source, “all of a sudden the web gains significant depth... the web was so shallow and uniformed now you can use it to go to the deep bottoms of the unknown in cinema.”

video from The Film Panel Notetaker

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Thrown to the Owls


Watching The Daily Show last night it hit me who Clinton campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe reminds me of: Leland Palmer, from Twin Peaks. Now, I’m not comfortable making any wild thematic comparisons between a fictional character created by David Lynch and real life person with a career in politics, mostly because I’m a Clinton supporter. Moreover, because finding similarities between Palmer (a man who is simultaneously wild with grief over the death of his daughter and is embodied with a murderous incarnation of evil in its truest form), and McAuliffe (a man who has been placed as the face of a campaign that --even I, a Clinton girl will admit-- is all but lost and is representing that campaign with a kind of delusional zeal and political posturing that played a part in bringing our girl down) doesn’t take that much real effort. However, I’m going to throw comfort aside in this instance. As we move into the general election, I know my candidate won’t be at the top of the Democratic ticket, but I find solace in that the death of the campaign for The First Woman President was perhaps heralded by the same sinister, invisible forces at work in everyday American society that murdered Laura Palmer. McAuliffe’s performance on The Daily Show-- and a performance of epic proportions it was-- echoed the maniacal delusion of possessed Leland Palmer. McAuliffe’s stubborn refusal to reckon with the realities of the all but lost Clinton campaign, and insistence on repeating well-vetted political rhetoric that has become an ineffective trope from most of Clinton’s aides (aside from those who choose to speak more from the hip and are thrown to the owls, just to keep my metaphors within the theme) left me feeling like he was moments away from bursting into Mairzy Doats within sight of Jon Stewart.

June's Screening: Shadow of a Doubt


As skeptical as my outlook is on collaboration in service of The Dark Crystal sequel, cooperation doesn’t always have to result in robbing a movie of its vitality. Alfred Hitchcock was a frequent collaborator, employing graphic designer Saul Bass on innovative credit sequences, working closely with composer Bernard Hermann to revolutionize movie scoring. On this month’s movie, Shadow of a Doubt (1943, 108min), Hitchcock worked with playwright Thornton Wilder (most famously author of quintessential high school theater production, Our Town) on the film’s screenplay. Hitchcock told Francois Truffaut, Thornton Wilder was memorable as the first American writer who agreed to work together to pen a film after Hitch’s move to direct films in America. In Hollywood, he said “I was turned down by many stars and writers who looked down their noses at the genre I worked in. That’s why it was so gratifying to for me to find out that one of America’s most eminent playwrights was willing to work with me and, indeed, he took the whole thing quite seriously.” No doubt Wilder’s willingness to collaborate with Hitchcock on the film lent credibility that would open doors for the director with future creative partners.

Throughout his films Hitchcock frequently enlists many thematic devices, and most the kind that lend themselves very easily to psychoanalytic interpretations for those of us with less even than an armchair analysts knowledge of Freud. Doubling and Doppelgangers abound in Hitch’s films, from the two title characters in Strangers on a Train whose paths intersect and then become mortally involved in the lives of the other, to Madeline and Judy, two women who seem to be separate but uncannily similar in the eyes of Scottie in Vertigo. Shadow of a Doubt is one of the most literal representations of Hitchcock’s frequent theme of doubling with two main characters sharing the name Charlie. One Charlie, played by Teresa Wright embodies the milkfed ideal small town American teenage girl, the other Charlie her middle aged uncle played by Joseph Cotton, a vagabond bachelor with a mysterious past. For a more thorough analysis of thematic dualities in Hitchcock’s films, see Mladen Dolar’s essay “Hitchcock’s Objects,” but here, briefly, “Some interpreters… have suggested that the duality is nothing but the dichotomy of good and evil, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ side, which makes it possible to get rid of the bad side to wind up with a traditional Hollywood happy ending…[In this interpretation] the link between good and evil remains an external one, the idyllic small town life has no connection with the ‘dark side’, the nightmare comes from some other place.” Dolar goes on to break down this analysis to reveal what he believes to be the truest sinister force that joins the good and the bad together in small town America: money.

Finally, watching Shadow of a Doubt one can easily see Hitchcock’s influence on David Lynch’s films. Much like most of Lynch’s work, which also frequently utilizes doubles and doppelgangers, the most sinister forces find their way to work their depravity on the pastoral setting of small town America. Its hard for me to give too much of a summary of Shadow of a Doubt without giving away too much of the fun, but by now you’ve probably figured out, in movies a visiting favorite uncle is not always what he appears to be.