Jamie Jay Johnson and Georges Perec: Holidays Around Desks

February 5, 2012 in 1960s, 2000s, Georges Perec, Jamie Jay Johnson | No comments

Jamie Jay Johnson is known as a documentary filmmaker with a comic tone and a unique cinematic voice. It was, in part, the inventiveness of his short work, such as Holiday Around My Bedroom (2003), that attracted the attention of Number 9 Films and the funding bodies required to create his excellent and touching piece Sounds Like Teen Spirit (2008).

A narrow focus that considers the filmmaker’s immediate surrounding – his bedroom – has an interesting parallel in the work of French filmmaker, novelist and essayist Georges Perec. The nutty looking Frenchman (see below) devised well-known literary experiments and imposed various constraints on his textual form: his novel La disparition (1969), for example, never uses the letter ‘e’. Just as Johnson tours his bedroom when in need of a break, Perec dispelled a creative block by looking in front of him and writing a portrait of the objects on his desk.

Both share a lightness of tone, as well as an ability to limit their horizons: for example, while surveying his desk, Perec muses, ‘all my pencils [are] sharpened (but why do I have more than one pencil? I can see six of them at a glance!)’ The observation is almost as silly as seeing Johnson shrink in size and go on a date with a fly.

 

Site Under Construction

January 2, 2012 in Uncategorized | No comments

Je Regarde and Timber Timbre’s “Do I Have Power”

December 9, 2011 in Uncategorized | No comments

55th BFI Film Festival: Interview with Richard Jobson

November 2, 2011 in 2010s, Richard Jobson | No comments

 

 

 

55th BFI Film Festival: Cinematic Abstraction in “The Somnambulists” (2012)

October 18, 2011 in 2010s, Joanna Kane, Richard Jobson, Sarah Kane | No comments

On Saturday, the director Richard Jobson introduced his new picture, The Somnambulists (2012), as part of the 55th BFI London Film Festival. I’ve never seen a film like it. Quite fairly, any discussion about it places much emphasis on the intensity of its message: according to the festival guide, it stands as ‘a response to our collective apathy to the war in Iraq’. But there is much craft here, carefully orchestrated by a filmmaker who always champions technological advances. So, while the stories are the focus, Jobson makes use of cinematic techniques to achieve the desired tone.

It would be an understandable first reaction to think that the devices and techniques of cinema have been purposefully drained from The Somnambulists. Sandra Hebron notes that the speakers, against a black backdrop, are ‘starkly but effectively’ lit so that we ‘concentrate on their words, without distraction.’ In other words, the severe matter is expressed in a suitably bare style. Jobson rejects any conventional narrative progression, presenting instead a series of subjective fragments which are united by a common theme (the experience of the war). Though this formal choice brings to mind the work of Sarah Kane (a dramatist who explores the literal and metaphorical meaning of a ‘fragment’ throughout her corpus), it is to her namesake, the Scottish photographer Joanna Kane, that we should turn to understand the film’s structure and aesthetic.

Joanna Kane’s project, The Somnambulists, shown in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2008, presents a series of digitally edited images of phrenological heads and death masks. Plaster off-white, these faces appear to peek out of a thick black fog. Eyes closed, these figures look faintly alive because of the possibility of sleep. Kane uses new techniques and old objects to explore the space between life and death. The photographer’s influence on Jobson is clear.

He also lights his speakers from above, allowing them to struggle to distinguish themselves from the black background. (Their black shirts provide no help.) If, though, Kane’s project is to create the illusion of life in the dead – or the inanimate – then Jobson seems to aim at something different. Through abstraction, he makes living flesh seem not quite alive. The most visually resonant moments of his presentation are those when the speakers’ eye sockets are bathed in shadow. At these points, the figures are at their most abstract – farthest away from being living subjects – because they are closest to our cultural images of death (the skull, the Grim Reaper).

We always see the (closed) eyes of Kane’s (still) subjects; we only need a flicker of the Grim Reaper during the delivery of one of Jobson’s stories to be haunted by the idea that these narratives are separate from the figures we see before us. The effect is chilling, like watching the twitching and animated limbs of a corpse motivated only by still-firing neurons. Whether or not the individual tales end in death, there’s a feeling that they all reach us from beyond a grave.

The BFI thinks this effect is stark. Though it is, the words are not presented unadorned, not given to us totally naked. The opening shot indicates that the film is not concerned with presenting any type of focused cinéma vérité: as a man on fire shapes an outline in flames and slow motion against a black background, with an unseen piano accompanying the image, we’re alerted to the importance of the filmic elements (cinematographic choices, editing, soundscape). The rhythm of the picture is created by a repeating pattern: an account from a speaker followed by a glimpse of a life left behind. We’re invited to take note of the variation within this sequence: from the first figure to the fifteenth, subtle changes in delivery or the position of the cut contribute to the overall effect. During one speech, on particularly resonant words, the lens begins a slow zoom out, reframing the head to create a mass of negative space that engulfs the speaker. During another, as we listen to an enraged cry of ‘Come on then!’, a series of faces quickly flashes before our eyes.

We shouldn’t treat The Somnambulists as a misplaced radio play. Though they are subtle and easily missed, the specifically cinematic details are essential to its overall effect.

 

Controlled Colour: Red, White and Blue in “Drive” (2011)

October 10, 2011 in 2010s, Newton Thomas Sigel, Nicolas Winding Refn, Ryan Gosling | No comments

In one of the more gruesome scenes in Drive (2011), Driver (Ryan Gosling) stands in a motel room with blood aggressively streaked across his face. Throughout the early parts of the film, he’s predominantly painted in cool tints (subdued greens, blues and shades of grey). Here, though, his own actions have caused a grim and literal recolouring. He becomes emphatically warm and the visual change reveals shifting circumstances: at this point, he is so captivated by Irene (Carey Mulligan) that he is willing to engage more fully with the world of crime. Nicolas Winding Refn, the director, and Newton Thomas Sigel, the cinematographer, control colour expertly, using a fairly limited palette to enact in light the tensions that exist between characters and social worlds.

Despite the extensive use of red, white and blue, the post’s title is misleading: Refn is not concerned with American nationalism or issues of the flag. Instead, there’s a use of colour that enunciates personal emotions by playing with the split between warm and cool. In the beginning, as mentioned above, Driver’s face is washed almost exclusively with the latter. Gosling’s understated performance, which combines subtle gestures and few words, achieves a characterisation that is paralleled in light.

In contrast, Irene, coloured in warm reds, oranges and yellows, radiates care and maternal love.

Refn carefully arranges the frame during Driver’s and Irene’s early meetings so that tints of different temperatures remain quite firmly attached to each character.

But, as the attraction becomes greater, the breakdown of social barriers is paralleled in a blending of hues. The pair are first cast together in a warm glow in Driver’s car, though the effect quickly enters Irene’s domestic space.

Refn’s and Sigel’s use of colour is subtler, though, than simply revealing a movement from separation to unity. Throughout the picture, there’s a tension between gradation and delineation. A scene near the end brings this design into focus. Irene walks back to her apartment, having received no answer to her knock on Driver’s door. The walls are a rich brown and her face is a warm wooden orange. She passes a framed picture of the sea which is composed of blues and greens. The particular perspective of the painting echoes the framing of the ocean in an earlier scene in which Driver commits his ultimate act of violence (which, by the by, we’re not shown). So, then, this image that brings him to mind only reinforces that he has gone. The situation is summarised by the relationship between warm and cool tints (easily kept separate by a frame): the bloody mess that has stained Driver’s face and has escalated beyond control ultimately renders the pair like oil and water, rather than two drops in an ocean.

Some Songs and Videos

October 3, 2011 in 2010s, Youtube | No comments

I saw Warrior (2011) last week. It ends with About Today, a lovely song by The National.

I’ve talked about the film before and I’ve also mentioned GORILLA productions and their excellent combinations of music and boxing clips.

Here are some other music videos that do fun things with visuals and, in the process, heighten our appreciation of the song they accompany.

Frogs in “The Virgin Spring” (1960)

September 26, 2011 in 1930s, 1960s, Fritz Lang, Ingmar Bergman | No comments

Ingmar Bergman does a funny thing in The Virgin Spring (1960). At the tense moment before the rape begins, when testosterone pumps through the two elder brothers, he provides a series of close ups that make the men look like frogs. So presented, the pair are dehumanised at their evil tipping point. There’s a faint underlying comic tone to the sequence which is predominantly sickening. It’s a master stroke of editing and direction, using juxtaposition and gestural similarities to create a tonal ambivalence.

Frogs have already been given metaphorical meaning in the opening scenes of the film, when Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom) fills a roll with one of the amphibians. This particular frog, startlingly black, stands as an emblem of trickery, spite and deceit. Later, when Karin (Birgitta Valberg) shares her lunch with the three herdsmen, the same frog pops out of its doughy hiding place. We’re given a close up of the creature. It rests in the centre of the frame, breathing regularly. Its body swells with every breath. With that rhythm and gesture established (in-out-in-out), the film then cuts to the aforementioned close ups of the herdsmen. As they stare at Karin, they clench and unclench their jaws, making their faces swell like frogs’ bodies.

Fritz Lang’s frogs in You Only Live Once (1937) immediately come to mind, as they too are used to elucidate human behaviour. But this lone creature keys into something quite different from Lang’s pair: it does not elegantly and charmingly simplify human desires; instead, it reduces the effect of baser instincts to an animalistic mess. What hope does Karin have, Bergman asks, when we’re not so far from frogs?

Tilt-Shift / Time-Lapse and the Joy of Seeing Differently

September 3, 2011 in 1890s, 2010s, Georges Méliès, Keith Loutit | No comments

I recently discovered the website Making the Movie. One of the first things I saw on it was this great little video:

As has been pointed out, it uses the technique pioneered by Keith Loutit in his Small Worlds project. I believe Loutit was the first to achieve this effect, a combination of tilt-shift lenses and time-lapse shooting. It must be exceptionally thrilling to see something so familiar in a way that literally no one else has seen before. It reinforces the power cinema – or the moving pictures – has to be magical. Méliès was drawn in the late nineteenth century to this potential: the chance to astound and to excite and to see differently. He made three heads where there is normally one and Loutit makes real life seem really quite small.

In their little ways, The Village and Small Worlds are also useful reminders that, at its best, cinematography uses technical mastery for creative ends.

Camera Movement in “The Hurt Locker” (2008) and “Restrepo” (2010)

August 12, 2011 in 1950s, 2000s, 2010s, Kathryn Bigalow, Sebastian Junger, Stanley Kubrick, Tim Hetherington | No comments

I watched Kathryn Bigalow’s The Hurt Locker (2008) and Tim Hetherington’s and Sebastian Junger’s Restrepo (2010) in quick succession last week. Placed so close, each film provides a useful counterpoint to the other. Both handle similar themes: THL is set in Iraq, while Hetherington and Junger follow a US Army platoon in Afghanistan. Restrepo’s tag line is startling to consider: ‘One Platoon, One Valley, One Year’ makes us pause and consider the achievement and bravery of the directors (along with – but separate from – that of the servicemen). A friend in the US Navy pointed me towards the picture and it was with sadness that I heard he had attended Hetherington’s funeral. The photographer died in Libya earlier this year.

In a sense, the camerawork in Restrepo is dictated by the action: often jolty and cramped whenever stable, Hetherington and Junger have to move and film however they could. In contrast, THL – shot on location in Jordan – has the luxury of artistic choice. We can hold up Kubrick’s Fear and Desire (1953) as an example of shooting war steadily: I’m thinking specifically of the scene where the camera glides above a solider who has gone over the top and is struggling to progress.

THL’s presentation is close – but not identical to – that in Restrepo. Both cameras are restless. Restrepo’s picture is constantly adjusted because of necessity (shook by a nearby explosion – jolted through fear of bullets). The movement is understandably forced. THL relies also on adjustments to the zoom (as well as the camera position) to achieve a similarly anxious tone. By jolting forwards and back, it adjusts the focal length and, as a result, the relationships between the various visual planes. The background is nudged slightly closer to the foreground, before being flung slightly back.

It is the size of these adjustments and how they are handled that creates the atmosphere. THL ‘s camera movement is not the assertive and emphatic lurch forward that characterises Hitchcock’s use of a zoom lens. But neither is it the smoothly orchestrated movement of an Ophulsian tracking shot. In other words, the camera neither guides the viewer to important figures or objects nor follows the principal characters around their environment. Instead, it is not so certain. As if suffering from terror induced ADHD, THL’s camera cannot decide where to position itself.

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