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lstine919 · 2 months

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Analytical Application 2

Shot:

The “shot” in film is a series of frames in continuous action without a cut between them. Regarding semiology, “the ‘shot’—an already complex unit, which must be studied—remains an indispensable reference for the time being, in somewhat the same way that the “word” was during a period of linguistic research,” (1) meaning that it is a building block for the filmic language essential for understanding the semiology of cinema.

The poster for the 2007 film Talk To Me incorporates several different shots. While the poster as a medium, unlike film, lacks the ability to show a moving, “alive” sequence, this poster attempts to convey multiple different points of information through the presentation of several locations and characters. While Metz concludes that there are other optical devices within cinema that can convey information, (2) the only one translatable to the poster is the shot. This poster frames characters in different shot sizes, suggesting a difference in importance between those with a larger frame that is close-up compared to those with a smaller frame that shows less detail. Additionally, the inclusion of a shot of the Capitol building from a skewn angle is an effective use of the mechanics of the shot in order to portray a disorder created at that specific location. More detailed shots taken directly from the film are present on the poster, but are difficult to see due to the distortion in their shape and their size relative to other shots, proving somewhat ineffective in providing insight into specific visuals from the film. The shots of the characters were taken outside of the context of the film, likely for promotional purposes, which fails to place these characters into the context of the narrative. These shots convey considerably less information than shots from the film, which may have been purposeful in order to not overstimulate the viewer of the poster and instead cause them to wonder what happens to the characters throughout the course of the story.

Myth:

“Myth” refers to the framework and value given to a specific sign based on both the way it is delivered and the external and pre-acknowledged factors that surround its reception. Barthes writes that “Myth is a type of speech,” (3) and that it is defined “by the way in which it utters this message,” (4) meaning that its communicative significance lies in the form in which it is implemented.

The poster for the 1959 film “Porgy and Bess” depicts three black characters in what seems to be a western town. With the predisposed mythology I’ve acquired from knowledge of cinematic history, it seems that this film may be an unfair, caricatured representation of people of color in the American west. In 1959, the film industry (as well as the country) still carried heavy racial prejudice, and it was often carried out through a negative depiction of people of color in films. Barthes writes that “all the materials of myth presuppose a signifying consciousness.” (5) Applied to this poster, the depiction of a man on his knees in front of a woman walking proudly and confidently reminds me of films such as Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Grease, and Moulin Rouge! in which a male protagonist spends the whole film attempting to win the approval of a woman, giving me a clue as to what the narrative may be like. In the background, Sammy Davis Jr.’s character in a yellow suit with white gloves and a cane elicits a myth of showmanship, as my previous knowledge of Sammy Davis Jr. as a stage performer along with the connotations of his costume assume such a persona. In many films from the 1950s, there is a side character present for comedic relief and support for the protagonist. Davis Jr.’s character seems to be just that, suggested by his presence behind both of the other characters on the poster and by my preconceived notions of him and his costume.

Semiotics of the Cinema:

The semiotics of the cinema refers to the language of which cinema is constructed, using visual signs and signifiers in relation to one another in order to construct a narrative. Metz writes that “the semiotics of the cinema must frequently consider things from the point of view of spectator rather than of filmmaker,” (6) meaning that the cinematic language should be built in a way that makes it easiest for the audience to understand.

The film Conquered City came out in 1962, six years before Metz’s Some Points In the Semiotics of the Cinema was written. While the concept of cinema as a semiotic language had not yet existed, the film’s poster still employs concepts and ideas that Metz would define afterward. Metz’s notion that in order to make the most effective film the filmmakers must heavily consider the perspective of the audience is strongly utilized in this poster’s design. (7) The tagline uses dramatic language and an exclamation point to build a simplified tension, the exact type of tension it predicts its audiences are looking for in the film. “David Niven vs. Ben Gazzara” in big letters emphasizes the presence of the two actors, using them as a draw for audiences. In that time, and even now, a lot of people went to see movies based on who acted in them. The film is capitalizing on this by displaying the star-studded cast above anything else, in order to drive the most sales (in contrast, director Joseph Anthony’s name is barely visible at the bottom of the poster). Because this film was released before the concept of the semiotics of cinema was established, it fails to capitalize on the effectiveness of the “shot” and its similarity to the effectiveness of the word in linguistics. (8) Only one shot is present on the poster, and its size is diminished compared to that of the actors. While it does introduce the romanticism that is present in the film, a romanticism that will likely draw audiences, the poster designers could’ve used more shots in order to make the poster more emotionally effective.

Cinematic Language:

The Language System is a structure of individual units where each unit’s importance is based on its relationship with the units around it. Saussure defines it as “a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others.” (9) The building blocks of this language are units that can stand in for another unit, or units that can have value through being put in relation with one another. Saussure writes that language is always composed of “a dissimilar thing that can be exchanged for the thing of which value is determined” (10) and of “similar things that can be compared with the thing of which the value is to be determined.” (11)

The poster for the 1990 film Nuns on the Run serves as an example of how visual language can be used to elicit a certain tone within the viewer. The terms of the wanted poster and the actual nuns themselves placed in juxtaposition with one another signifies an irony, as they should be in jail while they are clearly out in the open air. This also clearly outlines the film’s main plotline. Barthes writes that signs can be indicative of moral feeling, (12) an internal emotion signified by an external visual. Here, the worried and alert faces of the men dressed in nun costumes utilizes the language system to signify their sinister intentions, as well as the actors’ over-caricatured portrayal of emotions. Saussure claims that language is assimilated by the individual, (13) which means that the signification each individual receives a sign with can be unique. One can view this poster as a crime thriller, not taking in the comedic nature of the taglines or aware of actor Eric Idle’s background as a comedian. Yet, “language is concrete,” (14) meaning that while people may have different interpretations of the sign, the sign itself does not change: each reproduction of the poster contains the same information. Saussure further writes that “in language there are only differences,” (15) and this is on display with the difference in the visual depiction of both protagonists in their mugshot versus them in the nun costume. Without the mug shots, one might assume that they are actually nuns, or have no reason to think they’re not other than their gender. But in conversation with the nun poster, their true characterization is more apparent.

Signified:

What is signified, also known as the “concept,” (16) is the internal meaning that a sign unlocks within the recipient, a signal of what the sign means. For example, the sign of a stop sign leads to the concept of one stopping at the stop sign. Saussure writes that “the bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary,” (17) in that it is up to the interpretation of each individual as they receive the sign.

The poster for the 1997 film Jackie Brown contains a multitude of signs that create concepts in the mind of the viewer. Because of the uniqueness of each individual’s signification of signs, I am only able to speak for the connotations that I myself receive from the poster. Firstly, the presence of guns signifies the concept of the “gun”, which I associate with violence. This signification is reinforced by my knowledge of director Quentin Tarantino’s work and its bloody nature. The concept of the title in stylish red-and-yellow letters contains a connotation of retroness, leading me to infer that the film either takes place in the 1970s or, like the letters of the poster, is simply created in the style of the 1970s. On their own, the two crumpled bills at the bottom don’t allude to a large amount of money, but that image in relation to the “half a million in cash” described at the top of the poster creates an image in my mind of a large duffel bag full of money, the concept of “wealth”. The fact that the poster mentions Christmas leads me to infer that the film itself takes place during the holiday season. This is a clever marketing trick, in that it could lead one to associate the concept of the film “Jackie Brown'' with the concept of “Christmas”, making them more likely to watch it during that time. Lastly, the depiction of the characters in sleek black-and-white photography alludes to the concept of the black and white visuals, which I connect to the noir film, leading me to infer that this film will be a mystery or a thriller.

(1) Christian Metz, “Some Points in the Semiotics of the Cinema” in Film Theory and Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 70

(2) Metz, Semiotics of the Cinema, 71

(3) Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: The Noonday Press, 1972), 107

(4) Barthes, Mythologies, 107

(5) Barthes, Mythologies, 108

(6) Metz, Semiotics of the Cinema, 69

(7) Metz, Semiotics of the Cinema, 69

(8) Metz, Semiotics of the Cinema, 70

(9) Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1915) 114

(10) Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 115

(11) Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 115

(12) Barthes, Mythologies, 26

(13) Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 14

(14) Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 15

(15) Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 120

(16) Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 66

(17) Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 67

@theuncannyprofessoro

#oxyvisualanalysis #structualism #semiotics

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hunxi-guilai · 3 years

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Hey, Hunxi, any chance of getting that meta about Crouching Tiger recontextualizing qinggong because I'm not sure what the difference is between "supernatural spectacle" and "oblique superhuman ability." Certainly Crouching Tiger was the first time I saw that kind of martial arts on film but I've assumed that's cause I'm a dumb white American. (Realize this is wildly off-topic, I'm just interested in it.)

(a follow-up to... this post, I think? not me elaborating on this ten months later)

so this ask sent me digging back through my old files, since that line referenced a paper I wrote in my first year of college, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and completely ignorant of film genre theory and the liberation that comes when you realize that all genres are simply constructs of society and marketing and have only as much power as you give them

but! before 我看开了, I wrote an embarrassingly long paper trying to split hairs between depictions of the superhuman, the supernatural, and the flat-out magical in East Asian martial arts film, which functionally meant that I was looking at portrayals of 轻功 qinggong (lit. "the art of lightness" aka wire fu) across different eras of wuxia cinema. was this essay fun to write? you bet. was it a good essay? well.

anyway, threw some relevant selections under the readmore

(obligatory disclaimer that I barely know what I'm talking about and I knew even less in my first year of college, everyone should just go read Stephen Teo's Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition if you want a thorough introduction to the genre and its history)

So it might help to know that I had set down the following definitions for the purposes of splitting hairs:

superhuman: "tied specifically to the abilities of each character, especially the physically impossible actions employed in fight sequences"

supernatural: "elements of the filmic world that break the laws of nature, science, or reality, and is often associated with a degree of spirituality or otherworldliness"

magical: "any set of supernatural abilities involving its own skills and technique that can stand independently from regular hand-to-hand combat, though the two may be intimately related"

(I think it's worthwhile to mention that the wuxia genre's relationship with quote-unquote "realism" is a fascinating and dynamic balance; as the genre goes through phases and new waves, this relationship can be emphasized or eschewed entirely, often depending on directorial style and/or market popularity. there's also a longer conversation to be had about "realism" in the traditions of Chinese art and theater/opera, but that's absolutely out of my area of specialty)

are these good definitions? not particularly. I don't pretend this was a good essay, but it might help contextualize some of the statements I make below

here's some analysis, borrowed primarily from David Bordwell, of King Hu's editing style in his wuxia films and how that factors into the "realism" of the martial arts depicted:

The boundaries of reality have always been porous in the genre of martial arts film; cinematically translated, this tendency manifests in what David Bordwell describes as the aesthetic of “The Glimpse” in King Hu’s filmography. Through a strategic form of editing, the fighting action in Come Drink With Me (1966) and A Touch of Zen (1971) lurks on the edge of visibility, creating the illusion that the characters literally move too quickly for the camera to catch up; or, as Bordwell explains in his comprehensive dissection of Hu’s filmic technique, Hu “frequently stages, shoots, and cuts his action so that it becomes too quick, too distant, or too sidelong for [the audience] to register fully” (Bordwell 118).

and specifically, King Hu's rendition of qinggong:

...Hu was far more concerned with “dignify[ing] and beautify[ing]” the “feats” of his warriors “without tipping them into implausibility and sheer fantasy” (118). This devotion to a semblance of reality appears in Hu’s portrayal of qinggong – or rather, his lack of portrayal. An established component of Chinese wuxia literature and film, qinggong can be literally translated as ‘the skill of lightness,’ or, as Stephen Teo puts it, “the skill of applying weightlessness” (Teo 32). Characters proficient in qinggong can soar across rooftops or leap twice their height from a standstill, land safely from great heights or save love interests from death-by-falling. In its most conservative depictions, qinggong is a superhuman skill that stands at the limits of believability and hypercompetence; in its most liberal renditions, qinggong becomes a stark indicator of the supernatural in a film. In Come Drink With Me, Hu exercises restraint in his portrayal of qinggong by illustrating it through a series of negatives – where Drunken Cat (Yueh Hua) was one moment, he no longer is by the next time the camera/Golden Swallow (Cheng Pei-pei) looks at him. Instead, Drunken Cat has inexplicably appeared across the river, leaving the viewer to presume that Drunken Cat has utilized his ability of qinggong to move in the time the camera looked away. In discreetly portraying qinggong in offscreen action, Hu minimizes the supernatural...

In the iconic bamboo fight scene from A Touch of Zen, Hu utilizes swift cutting and editing (his average shot lasted around 4.5 seconds) to depict qinggong – again, at the edge of visibility (Bordwell 127). In a fight-ending series of acrobatics, Yang Hui-ching (Hsu Feng) leaps off bamboo trunks to dive down from the treetops. Rather than openly utilizing wire-work or slow motion, Hu gives his characters more airtime by “adding more fleeting actions – a foot striking a tree trunk, the flash of a body twisting and spinning to keep aloft a split-second longer,” but never pulling back for a long shot that would expose the supernatural/superhuman ability for his audience to see (Bordwell 131). The addition of these “fleeting actions” create a semblance of physics in Hu’s world; Yang’s slippered foot pushing off of one bamboo trunk in one shot is followed closely by her leaping towards another, suggesting causality in a series of illusions created by Hu’s masterful use of constructive editing (Bordwell 131). Through his cinematic ellipsis, Hu hints at the superhuman capabilities of his characters but refrains from displaying it directly on film.

so, that's King Hu and wuxia in the 70's. it's not that there was no wuxia in the 80's and 90's (that is, after all, the heyday of Tsui Hark and Chu Yuan and somehow, Wong Kar-wai getting in there a bit with 《东邪西毒》 Ashes of Time), but I was a sleep-deprived undergrad and jumped straight to the 21st century:

In stark contrast to the frenetic, fragmented qinggong of King Hu, Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou present an ethereally graceful and beautifully serene version of weightlessness [...] In Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Jen Yu (Zhang Ziyi) often employs qinggong to leap into the air from a standstill to escape, chase, or attack. Later, in Lee’s homage to the bamboo forest-battle in King Hu’s A Touch of Zen, Jen Yu and Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-fat) clash intermittently on the treetops of bamboo, which sways seductively in an oncoming storm. As the two soar past each other, Lee’s skillful manipulation of wire-work shown lovingly in his long shots creates the sense that the warriors are not creatures of the earth, but supernatural beings of the air who must touch down on the bamboo to keep from drifting away into the sky. Likewise, in Zhang Yimou’s 2002 film Hero, each assassin can soar backwards out of range of weapons, break into flight while charging to meet an enemy, or change direction in mid-air. [...] The result: a mythical, timeless aura that emphasizes the fantastic and romanticized aspects of an imaginary ancient China.

(digging through my old files again, and this analysis owes pretty much its entirety to Kin-Yan Szeto's chapter "Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: gender, ethnicity, and transnationalism" in The Martial Arts Cinema of the Chinese Diaspora, which is really a very good piece that puts Crouching Tiger in its rightful place)

it’s worth noting that depictions of qinggong/flight aren't necessarily constrained by the development of cinematic production and special effects--for example, Tsui Hark in Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983) was freely and liberally using wirework shown on-screen as well--but I’m fairly confident that a direct line can be drawn from Crouching Tiger and Hero’s depictions of qinggong as graceful flight to the liberal use of wirework in wuxia/xianxia film and TV today. As Szeto writes:

"Unlike previous wireworks used for the sake of spectacle, Lee employs the long shot to expose the supernatural power of the flight so as to enhance and express the emotion of the characters. Both technology and capital allowed Lee to break physical laws in imagining the flying sequence. He took a literal approach to making these fantastic legends into live-action visual images with the help of modern technology, transforming the dreamy imagery of soaring warriors from wuxia novels onto the screen...Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s use of long shot to record bodily movements purposely tries to differentiate itself from the fragmented flight sequences of Hong Kong martial arts films and the special effects that enhanced Spider-Man. Lee’s reworking of the wuxia and martial arts choreography and filming techniques thus becomes significant in a film production targeted at transnational film markets." (58)

Szeto then goes on to analyze the use of qinggong as spectacle and its function in a deliberate (self-)Orientalization and mythmaking on Ang Lee's part, but that is much too deep of a dive for this tumblr post

revisiting this essay several years down the line is fascinating because what Teo previously presented as the genre split between wuxia vs. shenguai (神怪, literally 'gods and monsters,' a more fantastic genre than wuxia) doesn't quite map onto my current understanding/usages of wuxia / 仙侠 xianxia / 玄幻 xuanhuan as genre designations. I'd love to hear Teo's take on modern wuxia dramas, but I feel like he wouldn't be caught dead watching them, and anyways, genre/genre definition isn't all that important at the end of the day, just a fun theoretical framework to hang some tumblr meta on sdlkfjsdlkjf

#ahahaha oh this got out of hand again #ask and ye shall receive #CQL worldbuilding #...tangentially

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gaming · 4 years

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Indie Game Spotlight: Plaything

This week’s Indie Game Spotlight is a reminder to lead with kindness. Plaything is a joyful and intimate game about your relationship to a small being crafted by your fingertips. In a series of personal and touching vignettes, you learn to live alongside each other. With a loving blend of hand-made animation and unfolding generative art, Plaything is a moving experience you can hold in your hands and close to your heart. We spoke with Niall Tessier-Lavigne and Will Anderson, who are both from the Highlands of Scotland. Niall has a background in games and animation, Will in animation and film. They’re co-designers on the game, which involves things like figuring out the visual direction, narrative design, and gameplay decisions. Read on!

What was the main inspiration for the game?

A lot of the ideas behind Plaything came from our desire to make something with kindness at its core. We were both thinking about our own relationships to technology and wanted to make something that’s very careful with its dynamics of dependency.

Niall: I was definitely inspired by seeing Will’s short film, Have Heart, which is what lead me to approach him in the first place. I find the ideas in it about work, love, and digital media really affecting.

Aside from that, I’d been thinking a lot about gardening games, kinda prompted by Max Kreminski’s gardening games zine; games that can have an element of nurture and care, without feeling like heavy systems. I’d also had other people’s words about empathy and games rolling around my head for a while—writing by Lana Polansky, Emilie Reed, thecatamites, Paolo Pedercini, to name a few.

Will: When I was younger, I was pretty obsessed with Tamagotchis. I had LOTS of them. The idea of nurturing something that isn’t real always fascinated me. On the surface, it feels trivial, but on closer inspection, being affected by something artistic in our lives is pretty crucial for our wellbeing. So that, along with very human character animation, is a source of inspiration.

What was it like, coming together from game development and film making backgrounds?

Early on, we did a lot of talking before figuring out what any aspects of the game would look like, or what the gameplay would consist of. We tend to approach things in quite a filmic way—jotting down possible moments and feelings, script-writing, doing rough animatics, sort of translating this into something less fixed, and more interactive. We love working with rough-cut trailers and animations of possible playthroughs set to music, as a way of thinking through the arc and tone of Plaything.

What are some ways you can create and customize the small creature?

You pull softly fizzing shapes into the center of space, loosely assembling the creature’s form. There’s a degree of control, but a big part of the design is how loose and gestural this action feels. You don’t have too much control over the final assembled form of your Plaything in the same way you don’t get to control how it behaves or feels towards you. Part of the experience of playing is mapping out how you act together, defining those hazy spaces at the edges of your relationship.

What other features does the game include?

Niall: All the features you know and love from your friends and family.

Will: Eyes, ears, mouths, arms & legs.

What do you hope players will take away from the game?

If we can give you something to waste your time with, in a way that feels genuinely meaningful, we’d be very happy. We hope to stir something up in the cold embers of our collective hearts.

Want to learn more about Plaything? Then sign up to the mailing list to very occasionally receive behind-the-scenes bits and pieces, along with news about the game’s release.

#Plaything #Indie Game Spotlight

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animepopheart · 5 years

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As the Spirit Moves You: How Studio Ghibli Films Leave Room for A Range of Religious Interpretations

Today’s guest post is by Kaitlyn Ugoretz, a PhD student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara whose research focuses on the globalization of Shinto through popular and digital media and the growth of online Shinto communities.

Since childhood, my life has been suffused with an appreciation for both anime and religion. Saturday mornings were dedicated to the weekly ritual of watching cartoons with my father (Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Sailor Moon, Mobile Suit Gundam Wing—if it was on Toonami or WB Kids, we watched it!), and Sunday mornings were spent listening to him preach the gospel as the minister of our small Presbyterian church.

As a child, I never really thought about how anime and religion might intersect, but all that changed after I watched Miyazaki Hayao’s Spirited Away. Something about the heroines, spirits, and grand narratives about relationships between humans and the environment spoke to me and inspired a fascination that continues to shape my adult life. And thanks to social media and blogs like Beneath the Tangles, I know that I’m far from alone in feeling that there is something deeper—something that goes beyond what we might think of as “mere” entertainment—to be found in many anime. Today, I study the variety of religious/spiritual responses to anime as a scholar of Japanese religion, popular culture, and digital media.

Ghibli—Global Giant

Shinkai Makoto’s 2017 blockbuster animated film Your Name has given Spirited Away a run for its money in the box office, but Miyazaki Hayao’s 2001 masterpiece reclaimed its status this past June as the highest grossing anime film in the world after its long-awaited release in China. Studio Ghibli has produced an impressive 10 out of the world’s top 50 highest grossing animated films, including beloved favorites My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and Ponyo.

Box office earnings are not necessarily an indicator of the spiritual depth of Studio Ghibli’s films, but they do demonstrate their enduring global appeal. Scholars of Japanese religion and popular culture, most notably Jolyon Baraka Thomas and Katharine Buljan and Carole M. Cusack, have shown that Miyazaki Hayao and Isao Takahata’s anime films resonate with audiences from a wide range of religious and cultural backgrounds and even inspire religious responses.

What is it about Ghibli films that continues to capture the hearts of people from all walks of life and allows for such a diversity of religious interpretations? Considering how Miyazaki represents his filmic intentions, in addition to how scholars and different fan audiences have interpreted the meaning of Studio Ghibli films, I find that it is the mixture of familiar and foreign religious elements that inspire us to reexamine our own beliefs and seek out those messages that resonate with us.

Miyazaki’s Mixed Messages

What Miyazaki intended to communicate to his audience through his films? After all, he is well-known for addressing moral and social concerns, including adolescence, good and evil, humanity’s relationship with nature and technology, modern anxieties, and nostalgia for the past. Given his tendency to populate his fictional worlds with spirits or gods (typically referred to as kami in Japanese) and other supernatural creatures who are closely related with nature, like the river spirit in Spirited Away and the Forest Spirit in Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki is often asked whether his films are meant to foster Shinto beliefs.

Cleansed river spirit

Shishigami-sama, the Great Forest Spirit

Shinto is a difficult tradition to define, as it has meant different things to different people throughout history. Some classify Shinto as a religion with clear beliefs and practices, while others characterize it as an essential part of everyday life in Japan which can only be understood experientially. In any case, most can agree that—at its core—Shinto is a ritual tradition which centers on the worship of kami, divine entities that inhabit extra-ordinary natural phenomena and man-made objects and whose favor grants benefits to one’s life in this world.

While this definition may seem to suit Miyazaki’s films well, the creator himself explicitly rejects Shinto as the source of his inspiration. Miyazaki grew up in the midst of WWII and his understanding of Shinto is informed by the legacy of what scholars call “State Shinto,” the modern Japanese government’s takeover of Shinto shrine affairs in order to promote imperialist and nationalistic ideologies. The filmmaker has given ambiguous answers to the question of whether his films are influenced by religion. In one interview, Miyazaki elaborated:

Dogma inevitably will find corruption, and I’ve certainly never made religion a basis for my films. My own religion, if you can call it that, has no practice, no Bible, no saints, only a desire to keep certain places and my own self as pure and holy as possible. That kind of spirituality is very important to me. Obviously it’s an essential value that cannot help but manifest in my films.

Through his consistently vague characterization of his personal brand of spirituality, Miyazaki—like any masterful storyteller—leaves room for his audience to draw upon the rich imagery, relatable characters, and familiar themes to create their own meaningful interpretations.

Scholarly Interpretations

Scholars of religion and media have interpreted Miyazaki’s works from a number of theological perspectives. Some argue that the kami characters and environmental ethics which Miyazaki employs are clearly drawn from Shinto, despite his claims to the contrary. Others have offered Christian interpretations of Miyazaki’s films. For example, Prince Ashitaka (Princess Mononoke) and Princess Nausicaä (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind) have been analyzed as messianic mediators between the profane and sinful realm of humanity and the sacred realm of Nature/Creation, as well as messengers of the gospel, promoting love and nonviolence.

Ashitaka goes into exile to restore harmony

Nausicaä is healed by the Ohm

Fan Interpretations

Scholars aren’t the only ones interested in the spiritual underpinnings of Ghibli films—fans around the world gather on- and offline to discuss their personal interpretations. These conversations are more than intellectual exercises; Thomas and Buljan and Cusack have shown that popular media like anime can inspire religious responses in audience members as well as entertain. That is, Ghibli films may influence viewers’ worldview and behavior, even if these viewers do not consider themselves to be religious. Thomas’s survey of Japanese fans shows that this influence may take many forms, such as a “belief in an immanent spiritual bond existing among all living things,” a pilgrimage to a special site like Yakushima forest (supposedly a source of inspiration for the sacred forest in Princess Mononoke), or a reenactment of the acorn-growing ritual portrayed in My Neighbor Totoro.

Erika Ogihara-Schuck examines how Miyazaki’s films have been translated into English and German in such a way as to secularize the spiritually-charged elements, referring to kami characters as “spirits” rather than “gods” and their powers as “magical” instead of “sacred” or “divine.” In some cases, this translation project has succeeded; some fans view Miyazaki’s films as ‘simply entertaining,’ while others read them as uncomfortably morally ambiguous, superstitious, or explicitly opposed to Christian theology. Still others in the Christian blogosphere—including contributors on sites such as Beneath the Tangles and Christ X Pop Culture—have found plenty of food for thought in Studio Ghibli films, prompting discussions of how anime narratives might productively challenge and affirm their core values as brothers and sisters in Christ.

Some audiences, as I have discovered in my own research, draw upon Studio Ghibli films as a source of Shinto spiritual instruction. In my study of the growth of predominantly non-Japanese online Shinto communities (OSCs) on social media, I find that anime plays an important role in the fostering of interest in Japanese religions, as well as participation in OSCs.

In interviews, surveys, and posts, several of the leading, active members of OSCs have noted that their early exposure to Ghibli films are what inspired their further study and adoption of Shinto. In community discussions, members share their interpretations of religious elements in anime. These conversations often focus on the relationship between humanity, kami, and nature and affirm the importance of moral character and gratitude. In similar fashion to other online religious communities, OSC members will comment on posts and keep the discussion going, negotiating interpretations, sharing links to blog posts and video clips which they find informative, and posing further questions.

In response to new members’ requests for more information about Shinto, each OSC has created its own list of recommended resources, which often include anime films and series in addition to books and blogs. As such, Studio Ghibli films like Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke have become, in effect, ‘required reading’ for OSC members. In this way, Ghibli films function as an important introduction to Japanese spirituality—particularly Shinto—for international audiences and a resource for the construction of personal and community beliefs.

Language Games

How can Studio Ghibli films spark so many different religious responses and interpretations—Christian, Shinto, and otherwise? The answer lies with two key concepts: Jolyon Baraka Thomas’s theory of “playful religion” and Leonard Primiano’s theory of “vernacular religion.”

Thomas argues that the distinction we make between religion and entertainment is artificial; entertainers can playfully use religious symbols to create an engaging story, and viewers can derive spiritual meaning from popular media, regardless of whether the creator intended for them to do so.

“Vernacular religion” refers to religion as it is lived—not what religious authorities say religion ‘should be,’ but how religious concepts are translated into a particular culture and actually practiced by people.

One way anime creators like Miyazaki manage to both entertain and inspire their audiences is to ‘play’ with the ‘languages’ of religion. These language games are a lot like playing Mad Libs. The storyteller chooses from among a variety of popular religious images and themes from different traditions—our collective religious vocabulary bank—and removes them from their original context. These religious elements are then recombined within a familiar narrative framework to create new images and stories that are compelling because they are both familiar and foreign to us. It is left up to each of us as audience members to make sense of these disassociated religious elements by translating them back into our own vernacular of faith.

Understanding this process of translation we all participate in as Studio Ghibli fans is important for two reasons. First, it reminds us that the meaning or significance of an anime is not defined by any one person’s vision, even that of its creator. No one has the ‘right’ answer. Our personal interpretations and those of others are just as meaningful, because they are grounded in our beliefs and thus have the power to affect the way we look at the world and live our lives. Second, the fact that the same images and themes can resonate with people of different faiths and backgrounds speaks to values we have in common, as well as a common desire to be spiritually engaged, as well as entertained, by the media we consume. Ultimately, the genius of Studio Ghibli films lies in their rich assemblage of religious symbols and grand narratives, which audience members are—if they are so inclined—free to interpret in a way that affirms their beliefs and feeds their soul.

Kaitlyn Ugoretz is a PK (Pastor’s Kid), anime fan, and PhD student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on the globalization of Shinto through popular and digital media and the growth of online Shinto communities. Kaitlyn runs Digital Shinto, a site where anyone can learn about and participate in her ethnographic study of Shinto’s development outside of Japan.

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Recommended Reading:

Buljan, Katherine and Carole M. Cusack. Anime, Religion, and Spirituality: Profane and Sacred Worlds in Contemporary Japan. Sheffield: Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2015.

Ogihara-Schuck, Erika. Miyazaki’s Animism Abroad: The Reception of Japanese Religious Themes in German and American Audiences. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2014.

Park, Jin Kyu. “‘Creating My Own Cultural and Spiritual Bubble’: Case of Cultural Consumption By Spiritual Seeker Anime Fans.” Culture and Religion 6.3 (2005): 393-413.

Thomas, Jolyon Baraka. Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012.

#studio ghibli #spirited away #shinto #religion #ghibli month

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thesunlounge · 4 years

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Reviews 356: Fulvio Maras, Alfredo Posillipo, Luca Proietti

In 1991, during Italy’s yearly Ferragosto holiday, the city of Rome was utterly empty, so much so that “you could die and not be noticed in the deserted streets.” Thus a trio of sympathetic and exploratory musicians named Fulvio Maras, Alfredo Posillipo, and Luca Proietti, who for their own varied reasons stayed behind, had full reign of a professional studio, which allowed them total freedom to create the music of their wildest fantasies. At this time, Maras was already a world traveller and veteran player, with credits extending at least back to the 70s and encompassing jazz, pop, theater, ballet, TV, film, and much more besides. Posillipo and Proietti, however, were newer to the scene…the former a horn player and producer who had worked with artists such as Jim Porto and Eddy Palermo and was in the group Gli Io Vorrei La Pelle Nera, the latter a guitarist, synthesist, and sound designer who, among many other achievements, eventually became the chief professor of music technology and sound engineering at the Saint Louis College of Music. And during that fateful summer holiday in Rome, with a studio overfilled with world instruments and futuristic gadgets, the trio combined their diverse backgrounds and myriad interests into a compelling and impossibly eclectic adventure called Sfumature, one which has just been reissued and lovingly expanded by Archeo Recordings, with the label including a remix, an unreleased track, translated liner notes, and remastered sonics.

Across the album, organic and machine rhythms blur together through fourth world rainforest rituals and broken beat funk and fusion groovers as colorful assortments of synthesizers and samplers merge together, equally reveling in textures of orchestral romance, filmic mystery, futuristic kosmische, and crystalline new age. Posillipo’s trumpet weaves solo songs of spiritual jazz over muted and equatorial hypno-jams while sometimes darting and dashing between an array of virtual woodwinds…all while synthesized basslines walk like a bebop stand up, slap like fusion funk, or squelch playfully towards acid. Angel voices presumably sourced from Maras’ ballet and theater performance archives sing through the mix, sometimes droning together with dark industrial synthesizer ceremonials while at other times alighting on operatic flights of wordless fantasy, which wrap the heart around with glowing threads of melancholic beauty as idiophones both real and imagined sparkle in the light of a setting sun. And the entire experience is awash in celebratory vibes born of creative freedom and imaginative spontaneity, with some the trio’s happy studio accidents even being detailed in the included liner notes, as Posillipo recalls his inspired choice to switch from trombone to trumpet and Proietti details the potential catastrophe of a forgotten a click track, only to have Maras perfectly nail the timing (a fact which is hilariously attributed to his lack of alcohol for that day).

Fulvia Maras, Alfredo Posillipo, Luca Proietti - Sfumature (Archeo Recordings, 2020) In “Gomma,” Maras’ marimba splashes through glowing tide pools while hand drums beat gently. Squelching basslines underly descending island melodies that see the marimbas merging with sampled steel pans…the whole thing radiating an irrestible Caribbean warmth. From here, the track ambles back and forth between instrumental choruses where idiophonic clouds alight on equatorial themes of sunshine joy, and more minimal stretches where Maras’ marimba wanders solo through worlds of seaside jazz tropicalia while hand percussions bop around acidic basslines. And at some point, shakers enter to guide the lackadaisical dance of island life fantasy. Splashing cymbals and cascades of metal begin “Panica iniziale” and timpanis roll like thunder beneath violent shaker motions. Dissonant swells of horror film drone surround militant drum rolls before everything recedes into a storm of cymbals, snake tails, and echo clicks. Cyborg choirs sing from the void and execute magisterial chord changes evoking Klaus Schulze’s Irrlicht…all while splattered symphonic percussion moves maniacally underneath. Choral layers recede to reveal pounding bass synthesizers that flub like rubber bands while martial drums and hissing shakers work the body. Then, towards the end, the layers of sci-fi dissonance return, as mysterious chord changes evoke terrifying landscapes of mist and shadow over a physical and ever-shifting panorama of bass sequencing and timpani terrorism. Then comes “Deserto” with metalloids bending and synthesizers blowing spectral clouds of darkness. Mysterious keyboard solos evoke slow motion explorations of mythical desert landscapes and clattering percussions surround tick-tock bass sequencing while melting wavefronts of sliding subsonic weirdness subsume the spirit. The mix is periodically disrupted by whip-crack bursts of sinister bass and machines moan in desperation as Latin percussion accents are subverted into an industrial drone jam…all until the rhythms disperse entirely, leaving resonant bass vibrations to coalesce with glacial themes of cosmic melancholia…as if dark and shadowy colorations are pooling together into an unsettled miasma.

For much of the remix of “Sotto la cascata,” you’d be forgiven for thinking it was the original version, for though this is a rather radical reworking, it doesn’t reveal its true magic until well into the song. Indeed, we start with the original’s throbbing contrabass motions and echo-soaked jazz filigree, with brushed snares working against sizzling cymbals. Berlin school sequences wash through aquatic fx hazes and a glorious voice sings wordless songs of mermaid majesty…the effect not unlike the work of María Villa or MJ Lallo. But whereas the original version ends on a stoned outro of contrabass and trapkit ghost notes, the remix brilliantly drops a boom bap breakbeat while arpeggiated synthesizers percolate through kosmische energy swells. At some point the haunting voice cuts away, with kick drums locking into a four-four heartbeat while ascending prog electronics evoke Pink Floyd. But we eventually drop back into the low slung drum groove, where the vocals are now a shadow of themselves as they swim around g-funk synth accents, future jazz basslines, and orchestral layers of space foam. Then in “Alla Casba.” zany pianos dance around forest flutes until a fat pounding basslines drops amidst smatters of equatorial hand percussion. After riding a tropical sunshine groove out, snaker chamer synth melodies start raining over the mix…their tones sitting somewhere between psaltery and crystal. Hand drums roll and hi-hats and tambourines lead a sensual island sway as fourth world melodies and cinematic ivories join together with exotic flute fantasias, resulting in a strain of magical Italo-balearica that encompasses vibes of esoteric darkness and romantic adventure. The crystallized string arps of “Dura Lex” follow, which execute an elven dance over a tribal ceremonial of wooden bass synthesis. Melodies of fairy fantasy intermingle with airs of classical grandiosity and solar swells of subsonic warmth float the soul while shakers sketch out airy rainforest rhythms. And as gemstone sequences and spiritual woodwind leads play off one another, their threads of paradise magic weave tightly around a joyous ethno-ambient percussion drift.

In “Trombe di Alfredo,” ticking tones of crystal overlay a manic string synth and percussion ritual as we sweep straight away towards a mysterious oasis of Arabian desert magic. Posillipo’s trumps is carried on a warming breeze as Maras and Proietti lock into a shamanic tribal trance, wherein hand drums from various cultures beat wildly, fourth world synthesizers drift towards the clouds, and tapped crystals hypnotize the mind. Bleary-eyed themes of cinematic romance swim deep in the background ether as drums continue their manic dance and occasionally, the string synthesizers rise to the surface to replace the exploratory trumpet solos with flowing songs of symphonic grandiosity and sorrowful desert mystery. “Amori,” which was inspired by Maras’ breakup at the time, sees harmonious waves of synthesizer billowing in…like a sea of neon pink crashing against a white sand shore. Cymbals sparkle and hand drums pound wildly alongside rimshot snaps while Posillipo paints cinematic trumpet leads over fusion-tinged fretless bass serenades. Enigmatic key changes plunge the mind into underwater landscapes and abandoned mermaid kingdoms, with the melding of exotic ambient and exploratory jazz bass reminding me of Motohiko Hamase. Swells of seaside ethereality wrap around the body as the basslines continue dancing alongside tapped cymbals and crazed percussions and all the while, Posillipo weaves in and out with warming wavefronts of bebop trumpet. A synthesized orchestra sways strangely in “Aura due”…as if swimming through an alien ocean while warming brass melodies swirl overhead. Sampled french horns play themes for a mist-shrouded dawn and oboes, bassoons, and clarinets weave together a tapestry of Italian 70s cinema romance, with the vibe like relaxing in a field of flowers and watching clouds drift across the great blue sky. Sprightly flute harmonies enter at some point as the virtual string orchestrations continue their drunken dream dance and as the reed instruments and aerophones intertwine, a summer shower of marimba begins falling…gentle at first…but then coming down like an overwhelming storm of hyperspeed chaos.

Violins saw through glowing reverberations in “Ballo accorto,” with the hypnagogic atmospheres interspersed by cymbal taps and hand drums. The track continues swelling with solar strength and emotional warmth as grandiose horn and flute themes flow down from the heavens, resulting in a dreamspace dance of tapped metals, rainforest drumming, and orchestral wonderment. At some point the strings recede, leaving space for tambourines jangles and tribal drum percolations, and once they return, the vibe is somehow even more epic than before, with Posillipo’s trumpet melding with currents of cloudland magic to lift the spirit towards a paradise sky. The original press of Sfumature ends with “Alfredo Fantasy” and its electronic and world percussion locking together for an exotica fusion jam, with chord stabs sitting somewhere between fusion and reggae floating overhead as the rhythms eventually settle into a stuttering and off-kilter funk break, which almost falls over itself each time it loops around. Snares and cymbals splash alongside the dubby melodics while distorto-basslines growl just out focus…their effect felt more than heard. And towards the end, the reggae riffs recede, leaving drums to work through an extended jam’n’slam, with touches of library funk, electro, and hip-hop merging while the basslines erupt towards jazz fusion slapping. Final track “Vertigini (Ambient Remix)” is exclusive to this Archeo Recordings reissue, and sees windchimes fluttering on an asymmetrical breeze and crystals conversing in cavernous spaces as a voice grows from pale mist into an all-consuming drone. Bubble clouds of inky synthesis billow up from seafloor vents, computronic diamond clusters rain down from an unsettled sky, and plucked string harmonics refract rainbow light through the rippling liquid atmospheres…as if a harp is being played in the middle of some celestial ocean. And later, mystical voices transmute towards angel opera flamboyance, ambient house chords incandesce in strange colorations, and metallic droplets fall into pools of liquified glass while pads modulate through resonating bodies of sonic shimmer as they move forwards and backwards in time.

(images from my personal copy)

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upontheshelfreviews · 5 years

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Merry Christmas everyone! To conclude this month of merrymaking we’re looking at an animated Christmas cult classic that I have a bit of a soft spot for. But perhaps it’s best to start at the beginning:

ETA Hoffman’s “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” is one of my favorite fantasy stories, though chances are you’re more familiar with the famous ballet by Tchaikovsky that it inspired. The music is gorgeous and instantly recognizable, but few know the actual story of The Nutcracker beyond what your average community production rolls out every December. Much of the plot plays out like a variation of Beauty and the Beast with a protagonist akin to The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy and story elements that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Grimms’ fairytale. Sadly, most of those details were lost in the translation from book to light holiday entertainment. Not that I’m complaining, I love the ballet, but there’s so much more to its origins that people aren’t usually interested in delving into.

I say all this because today’s movie, The Nutcracker Prince, is one of the very few filmic adaptations that pays faithful tribute to both its source material and its theatrical counterpart. In spite of – or perhaps because of – the popularity of the ballet, there’s been only a handful of film versions of Hoffman’s The Nutcracker (or at least a handful compared to something like A Christmas Carol). How good you find each of them to be depends upon your taste and the production value. I’ve found remarkably little about the making of this particular adaption, but that probably has to do with the fact that it was barely a blip on the box office radar. Released through Warner Brothers (which itself would issue another Nutcracker movie starring Maculay Culkin six years later), this was the only full-length animated feature created by Canada’s Lacewood Productions. A shame, really, because looking at The Nutcracker Prince you can see the studio’s potential. But thanks to the home video circuit, the movie has found a new life as a nostalgic Christmas classic for 90’s kids like myself. Let’s unwrap the reasons why, shall we?

If there’s one thing I appreciate about The Nutcracker Prince, it’s how it plays around with the music order to emphasize a scene’s mood rather than slavishly follow the original score. Instead of the recognizable jovial overture piping over the main titles, we have the Snowflake Waltz from the finale of Act 1, building an aura of mystery and magic to lure us into the story. A series of cross-hatched stills introduce us to our cast and characters, and I tell you, when you recognize these names you will not be able to look at this movie the same way. If I told someone that Anne of Green Gables, Jack Bauer, Lawrence of Arabia, Jimmy Neutron’s grandma and several prominent cast members from Canada’s Saturday morning fixture The Raccoons shared the screen together once, they’d think I was crazy, but as you’ll see it’s the honest to Zeus truth.

Our story begins proper with Clara Stahlbaum (Meagan Follows) and her younger brother Fritz delivering last-minute gifts to their neighbors on Christmas Eve. They race through the icy streets of Germany until they reach the shop of eccentric family friend Uncle Drosselmeier (Peter Boretski), a clockmaker and expert craftsman of mechanical toys. Drosselmeier greets the children and they invite him to come light up the Christmas tree with the family, but he enigmatically tells them he has to prepare for his nephew. This comes as news to Clara and Fritz, since they’ve known Drosselmeier for their whole lives and have never heard him mention a nephew before. Drosselmeier sends them on their way promising he’ll be at the Stahlbaum’s party that evening. Once they’re gone, he hints that there may be something magical in the air this Christmas…

“Blasted pixie dust everywhere! Once the holidays are done I’ve got to get the place fumigated!”

On their way home Clara and Fritz debate what Uncle Drosselmeier’s big annual present he makes for the family will be this time. Fritz, the little future warlord that he is, wishes for a working fort with a mechanical army, while Clara dreams of an enchanted garden where swans in golden necklaces glide across the water. This conversation is a little holdover from the Hoffman story that I like. One of the most difficult challenges every writer faces is writing natural sounding dialogue for children; while Hoffman’s dialogue is a bit stilted by the conventions of the era, the meaning still comes through. Fritz laughs at Clara’s fantasy but because he finds the idea of swans wearing jewelry more ludicrous than a magic garden, which is how an ebullient boy like him would think.

Back at the Stahlbaums, preparations for the Christmas party are underway. The parents give their children their presents: older sister Louise (who’s often excised from other adaptations) receives a pretty new dress, Fritz a hobby horse and toy soldier gear, and Clara a pair of ballet slippers and a new doll she christens Marie. I have to wonder if this is some kind weird in-joke since in the story, the main character is called Marie and the doll she receives is the one who’s named Clara. What happened during the process of making this movie that resulted in their names being switched? Clara is thrilled since these slippers bring her one step closer to her dreams of joining the royal ballet, but feels a touch bemused when she overhears her mother getting choked up at the notion that this may be Clara’s last doll.

The party arrives, including Louise’s boyfriend Eric. Clara and Fritz tease the lovebirds (though to be frank, anyone who wears a powdered wig twelve years out of fashion to something that isn’t a costume party deserves to be ridiculed) but something about their shared intimacy stirs something within Clara. This on top of the adult party guests commenting on how fast she is growing marks her entrance into that state of melancholy and confusion that comes from standing between childhood and adulthood and not knowing where you belong. Clara’s age is never mentioned though I suspect she’s roughly twelve or thirteen, right on the cusp of adolescence and about the time where that mindset begins to sink in. She still plays with dolls and treats them like they were alive, but imagines a future as an adult. There’s a growing sadness over the impending decision between the two that she subconsciously acknowledges through her playing with Marie. This theme isn’t present in the Hoffman story (Marie is a confirmed seven year old in the prime of juvenescence) but it’s been incorporated into the Maurice Sendak retelling a couple of years prior to The Nutcracker Prince and I like its inclusion here as well.

“I wonder if this is anything like what my pen pal Wendy went through with that Peter boy…nah, you’re overthinking it, Clara.”

But there’s no time for her to ponder the implications as a crack of thunder, gust of wind and explosion of fireworks marks the arrival of the final party guest – Drosselmeier. He comes bearing his greatest creation, an enchanting music box castle complete with marching soldiers, seven swans a-swimming, and figures dancing inside the ballroom. In another humorous scene from the original story, Clara and Fritz fawn over the castle while frustrating Drosselmeier with their requests to make the automated figures do more, leading him to go on a brief “kids today don’t appreciate shit” rant.

As the party guests waltz to the strains of more Tchaikovsky, Clara wanders by the tree and spies a present she hadn’t noticed before – a nutcracker in the shape of a soldier. He’s not the most handsome toy in the box, but there’s something charming about him that she is drawn to. Drosselmeier confesses that he’s just part of his gift for the family and demonstrates how he works. On seeing the Nutcracker, Fritz wrestles him out of Clara’s arms and insists he has a go. But because there are no nuts left, he tries one of his toy cannonballs and breaks its jaw. Drosselmeier cheers Clara up by telling a story of how the Nutcracker came to look as he does. And this is where things get…weird.

Now I don’t mind the inclusion of the story-within-a-story. I’m happy they go into how the Nutcracker was cursed unlike most other versions, and there’s some good gags thrown in that make me chuckle. It’s how they go about it that I take some issue with. First, look at the movie’s style looked so far.

The character designs are clearly inspired by Disney – big eyes, soft rounder faces, realistic body proportions for the main characters, only slightly exaggerated for the lesser ones. The backgrounds are warmly lit and richly detailed, like an early work by Thomas Kincade. Overall it feels like something out of a classic storybook.

Now here’s some screencaps from Drosselmeier’s story.

“All right, who changed the channel to Cartoon Network?”

The scene doesn’t even look like it’s from the same movie. It goes from feature film quality to a Saturday morning cartoon, and that’s not entirely coincidental. Lacewood Productions grew out of Hinton Animation Studios which primarily made, you guessed it, cartoons for tv. And Hinton Animation itself had its roots in Atkinson Film-Arts, the studio that produced The Raccoons, hence why some of the cast makes appearances. But because I couldn’t find anything on the making of The Nutcracker Prince, we’ll never know if they went this route because the budget ran out, or the animators didn’t feel comfortable drawing the entire movie in the Disney house style and worked out some kind of compromise, or they just wanted the reveal of the Nutcracker’s human form at the end to be an even bigger surprise. Given some time and creativity they might have been able to come up with something better. You could argue this is how Clara envisions the story playing out in her head, but I don’t think a child from the 1800’s would imagine a fairy tale in the style of Danny Antonucci. In fact, if you played music from Ed Edd and Eddy over this part it wouldn’t feel out of place. Everything is played up for nothing but laughs, not even the Nutcracker’s transformation into a lifeless object, which should be an emotional gut punch. And I’d be ok with all this if it was a short sequence, but it lasts fifteen minutes. That might not seem like long, but since this movie is only seventy-five minutes that means it takes up a good portion of its first half. Plus the cuts back and forth between the story to it being told reminds you of how jarring the whole sequence is compared to the rest of the film.

But on to the story itself. Drosselmeier’s tale takes place in a faraway kingdom belonging to a King who I can only describe Yosemite Sam in his golden years right down to the ornery western accent (it wasn’t until doing my research that I discovered he’s voiced by the Texan monster from the Beetlejuice cartoon which certainly explains it), an extreme doormat Queen, and their daughter, the “beautiful” but very spoiled and unfortunately named Princess Pirlipat. They have in their employ a world-famous clock maker and magician coincidentally also named Drosselmeier and his apprentice, his shy nephew Hans (Kiefer Sutherland).

“Patience, friends. The joke you’re all expecting is coming.”

The occasion on which this flashback takes place is the King’s birthday, and the Queen has put in an order for a cake made out of his favorite food, blue cheese (would that make it a blue cheesecake?) This has the unwanted side effect of drawing out every mouse in the palace. Led by the Mouse Queen (legendary comedienne Phyllis Diller) and her dimwitted son (Mike MacDonald), they pounce upon the cake just as the Queen is putting on the finishing touches.

With no time left to make a new cake, the Queen is forced to send it out to the King and his party guests. This disaster is almost salvaged by a sycophantic Emperor’s New Clothes-style response to the dessert, but Pirlipat ruins everything by whining how she refuses to eat that repulsive offal. The King promotes Drosselmeier to the post of Royal Exterminator and soon all the mice are caught – except the Mouse Queen and her son. She takes her revenge out on Pirlipat; using her dark magic she curses the princess with extreme ugliness, cementing it with a bite to the foot.

Oh please, that’s just Kellyanne Conway before her makeup.

Eager to blame somebody for Pirlipat’s state, the King is ready to execute Drosselmeier until the Queen suddenly intervenes and begs him to consider giving the clockmaker some time to reverse the curse. It was at this moment I realized the King and Queen here are like if the monarchs from Alice in Wonderland had their personalities switched. They even have the same body types as their Disney counterparts.

The King reluctantly acquiesces, but gives Drosselmeier and Hans no more than…well…did I already mention Kiefer Sutherland is in this movie?

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“Your obligatory reference humor, all wrapped up in one neat package. Merry Christmas!”

So Hans and Drosselmeier study the princess to figure out a way to break the spell, not helped by Pirlipat’s constant ear-bleedingly grating crying. Her only comfort is Hans feeding her nuts he cracks for her himself. Inspired, Drosselmeier researches well into the night and discovers the cure for Pirlipat’s condition – the Krakatooth Nut, the hardest nut in the world. It can only be cracked open by a young man who’s never shaved or worn boots and they must take exactly seven steps to and from the person they’re feeding the nut to with their eyes shut and without stumbling, which even by fairy tale logic is some damn arbitrary rules.

The King invites noblemen from around the world to crack the Krakatooth with the promise of marrying Pirlipat and becoming heir to the kingdom if they succeed, though he has them and the rest of the court blindfolded so they won’t be scared off by her hideousness. Unfortunately each man who makes an attempt winds up with a mouth full of broken teeth. The Mouse Queen, confident in her evil plan, watches the misery play out with delight. Hans, however, decides to give it a try, and to Drosselmeier, the royal family, and the Mouse Queen and Prince’s surprise, he succeeds. Pirlipat is transformed back into her normal, terrible old self, however the court is too busy fawning over their restored icon to notice what happens next.

Enraged over being foiled, the Mouse Queen casts a curse on Hans to make him “the prince of the dolls”. Before he can take his final step backward, she bites his foot and he is transformed into a wide-smiling nutcracker. In his new form he accidentally knocks over a line of busts domino-style, the last of which the Mouse Queen is too late to escape from. I love it when villains are hit by instant karma. Alas, Pirlipat takes one look at Hans and refuses to marry a doll that’s not even half as ugly as she was moments ago.

Yep. Totally unmarriageable material.

On seeing his prospective son-in law for himself, the King accuses Drosselmeier of trying to trick his daughter into marrying one of his contraptions. He has the poor guy who’s shown nothing but years of loyalty and service to his outlandish demands banished forthwith while he and his wife and daughter celebrate their own selfish victory. I always hated how they never earned some kind of punishment for their behavior, but considering the boundary-shifting turmoil Europe endured before, during and after this tale was written, it’s more than likely these foolish monarchs will get what’s coming to them in the worst possible way down the line.

Enjoy your power while you can, assholes. Come the Napoleonic wars, you’re all royally screwed.

As for the Mouse Prince, he mourns his mother for all of ten seconds before realizing her death makes him the new Mouse King. He declares to Drosselmeier that he’ll have his revenge on the Nutcracker – not for killing mommie dearest but for smashing the end of his tail when the busts fell and making it go crooked.

With the story done, we abruptly return to the party and Clara expressing her disappointment in Hans’ unfair fate. Drosselmeier assures her that while Hans may be stuck as a Nutcracker, he’s still the rightful ruler of the magical kingdom of the dolls and the spell over him can be broken, but only if he defeats the Mouse King and wins the hand of a fair maiden. I love Clara’s reaction to this; she rolls her eyes and wonders why all fairy tales have the same solution.

Long after the party has ended and the Stahlbaums are fast asleep, a restless Clara sneaks downstairs with her kitty Pavlova to check on her Nutcracker. She introduces him to his new subjects, her toys – Marie, her old matronly doll Trudy, and Pantaloon, the ancient captain of Fritz’s toy soldiers. Taken by a music box’s melody, Clara shares a romantic song and dance with the Nutcracker to the tune of the Waltz of the Flowers, not unlike the one Louise and Eric had earlier.

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And for those of you watching, yes, Clara is clearly rotoscoped when she’s dancing. I’m not against rotoscoping as long as animators don’t rely too heavily on it (COUGHBAKSHICOUGH), though the use of it here as well as in one other scene emphasizes how uneven the rest of the film’s animation is under scrutiny. I do wish there was a full version of this song somewhere though because it’s quite pretty.

The music comes to a sudden halt as Pavlova breaks an ornament. Clara quickly stashes the Nutcracker our of fear of being caught out of bed, but before she can return upstairs she’s startled by the famous ghostly image of Drosselmeier atop the grandfather clock in place of the decorative owl, his cloak billowing out like wings. He showers the entire parlor in pixie dust, and goofy-looking mice armed with forks and needles pop up from of every crevice. Pavlova scares them away from Clara until one arrives to scare him back – the Mouse King, looking far more intimidating than he did in the flashback.

One is an animation student’s design project, the other is Ratigan’s cousin. Would you believe they’re one and the same?

Drosselmeier also douses the toy cabinet with his magic and brings them all to life. The Nutcracker is woken up and, having no idea of what’s happened since the incident with Pirlipat, quickly has to come to grips with his new form and the fact that a sociopathic mouse has sworn a vendetta against him. And you thought the Hangover guys had it bad. Marie and Trudy plead him to take up his mantle as Prince of the Dolls and fight despite his inexperience. Fritz’s soldiers vow their loyalty and Pantaloon (voiced by Peter O’Freaking Toole) is made second-in-command. Though rather than do any actual fighting the old coot drones on and on in Shakespeare references.

“So we’re not watching Ratatouille Peter O’Toole so much as Man of La Mancha Peter O’Toole. Imagine my delight.”

Actually, like the Marie/Clara name switch before, I have to wonder if this odd characteristic of Pantaloon is another subtle in-joke or reference towards the original story. Hoffman was a big Shakespeare fan and often referenced him in his writings, including The Nutcracker. In the book when Fritz’s soldiers desert the battle, the Nutcracker cries out the famous line from Richard the Third, “My kingdom for a horse!” (paired down here to a simple “Come back!” when the toy horses run free). In a weird way, having Pantaloon riff on Shakespeare is a nod to Hoffman. On top of that, one of his first lines is “All for one and one for all”, which everyone remembers from Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers. Years after Hoffman’s Nutcracker was published, Dumas wrote his own version of the story which is the lighter, softer one that the ballet takes the most cues from. So whether or not this was intentional is up for debate, but if it was I give the writers all the credit in the world for honoring both authors of The Nutcracker in such an obscure and subtle way.

The battle between the mice and the dolls promises to be an exciting one. The problem is once it gets going, it’s so wildly unfocused. The mice and dolls run around each other aimlessly firing and flailing at will. Clara could end all this just by kicking the mice to the other side of the room, but she just stands to the side and giggles at everything happening. Then there’s Marie, who in spite of Trudy strongarming her into helping the fight barely does anything other than scream in a stereotypical Southern accent and complain about how all this fighting is spoiling her complexion, like if she were a more spoiled version of Princess and the Frog’s Charlotte LaBouff. She’s marginally more tolerable that Pirlipat. Granted she does have one funny moment where her dress gets splattered with cheese and that’s what pushes her into a violent rage against the mice.

“And you will know my name is the Lord & Taylor when I lay my vengeance upon thee!”

Anyway, the mice hold down Nutcracker long enough for the Mouse King to have a go at killing him. Clara finally intervenes, throwing her slipper at the Mouse King and knocking him off his high toy horse. But she slips on a marble into the clock and falls unconscious.

Clara wakes up back in her bed on Christmas morning, her head wrapped up in bandages. Nobody believes what she saw the previous night, owing her delusions to a fever sustained from her injury. Drosselmeier pays Clara a surprise visit and presents her with a newly fixed Nutcracker. Grateful as she is, Clara calls him out for not doing anything when his own nephew was in danger, though Drosselmeier states he’s not the one who has the power to save him. Clara’s mother insists she stay in bed and do nothing for the rest of the day, which, come on Mom. Worst Christmas ever.

That evening the Mouse King also pops into Clara’s room to return her slipper. Awfully decent of him, all things considering. After making more big talk about how he’s gonna turn Nutcracker into a pile of splinters, Clara lures him into her drawer with the promise of some chocolates Fritz left her earlier and traps him in there. She flees downstairs to hide Nutcracker, but the Mouse King has mastered offscreen teleportation and threatens to kill Pavlova if she doesn’t hand him over. The owl on top of the clock changes into Drosselmeier and once again he brings the toys to life. This time it’s just for moral support as Nutcracker and the Mouse King battle mano-e-mouso up the Christmas tree. It’s a big improvement over the first battle. There’s more focus since it’s just the two of them fighting and there’s creative use of the terrain and presents around it. My one complaint is that Nutcracker doesn’t drunkenly tackle the tree itself at one point, but we can’t have everything we want for Christmas.

Whomsoever pulls the sword from the spruce shall become king of all Toyland! Oops, wrong mythos.

At one point the Mouse King nearly runs through a defenseless Nutcracker but Pantaloon bravely intervenes at the cost of a nasty back wound. Finally, Nutcracker delivers the killing blow and the Mouse King’s body crashes to the floor. The mice scatter and the toys declare victory. But Pantaloon’s batteries are about to expire, and since the Stahlbaums out of double-A’s the only way to save him is to get him to the Land of the Dolls; the gate to which is coincidentally right through Drosselmeier’s castle. Nutcracker eagerly invites Clara to join them, and after saying some mysterious something or other about time, Drosselmeier shrinks her down to their size with magic. They enter the castle, and Pavlova goes to inspect the Mouse King, which, for a decomposing corpse, seems to be growling an awful lot…

In the castle Marie gets sidetracked by the waltzing gentlemen while the rest continue on. They reach some lovely winter gardens where the snow is made of coconut icing and the royal swans Clara has fantasized earlier wait to take them on their journey. Since Marie is too late to join them, she has to settle for being dragged through the air on a common mallard.

Still better than flying United Airlines.

The swans soar over a forest of Christmas trees up to the stars and through a magical waterfall that changes Clara and Nutcracker into attire befitting royalty and restores Pantaloon to health. They all land at a beautiful palace made of sweets where Nutcracker’s subjects give them a warm welcome. Clara and Nutcracker head out on to the ballroom floor to dance to my favorite piece from the ballet – scratch that, of any classical composer – the achingly beautiful Pas De Deux.

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Like Clara’s solo before, the choreography is rotoscoped, but they’re much more clever at hiding it this time around. The dancing plays out like a dreamy montage with the moves fading in and out from one another, alternating between pink and blue silhouettes, minimally colored full-body shots, and more detailed animation reserved for closeups. There’s also an old-fashioned Vaseline-on-the-lens-style filter on, the kind normally reserved for romantic moments from Hollywood’s golden age which befits the tone they’re going for.

With the dance done, Nutcracker asks Clara to stay with him and rule the Land of the Dolls forever. Clara is sorely tempted, but something holds her back from saying yes. The idea of living in a candy castle with her dream prince and childhood friends is too good to be true, a perfect happy ending. And that’s just it – an ending. Clara has dreams beyond that will never come true if she settles, dreams of seeing the world and being a prima ballerina which can only happen if she chooses to grow up, and she wants to in spite of how much she’s fallen in love with Nutcracker. It would have hit harder if this theme of choosing to mature vs. clinging to girlhood was explored more throughout the movie, but the point still stands.

Now that the desire to grow up has taken hold, Pantaloon, Marie and Trudy change back into ordinary toys, the spark of life bestowed by childhood imagination put out. One by one, the denizens of the doll kingdom drop like flies, their number growing as Clara keeps justifying her refusal to stay.

And as if things couldn’t get any worse, guess who crashes the party?

Ohhhhhh shiiiiit….

Up to this point the Mouse King was a comical villain who was difficult to take seriously. But now here he is like Ratigan in the final act of The Great Mouse Detective, bereft of his senses and embracing his inner animal. His chest wound is still bleeding, his breathing is ragged, he doesn’t even talk, and he shuffles forward like a zombie, but nothing holds him back his single-minded pursuit of Clara. You can’t even tell if he’s going after her because he recognizes the part she played in his eventual demise or he’s desperate to stick it to Nutcracker before he drops dead. Hell, maybe in his near-death state he’s so delusional that he thinks Clara IS Nutcracker. That makes it even more terrifying; he knows he’s dying but refuses to go without taking someone, anyone out with him in as violent a manner as possible.

The circle-eyes kind of kill it for me, though. I mean, when a bad guy or monster is cornering you in their final moments, which gaze is more threatening – bloodshot, glowing and blank, or colorful cartoon rings? Unless their name is Judge Doom, the answer should always be the former.

Defenseless, all Clara can do is pelt dessert at him. But it’s only delaying the inevitable. And when Nutcracker tries to help, the change slowly and painfully takes over him and he is forced to watch as his mortal enemy corners his true love, resulting in the most arresting visual of the movie.

Nutcracker gasps out Clara’s name one last time and morphs fully back into wood. A single tear remains on his face, the only sign he was ever truly alive.

The Mouse King traps Clara on the balcony, lunges at her and goes over the railing, finally taking himself out with a classic Disney villain fall. Clara pulls herself back up and sees the palace is now completely abandoned and filling up with mist. She cries desperately for her Nutcracker as the final heartrending strings of the Pas De Deux play, and the scene to slowly fades to black.

This scene…this whole scene from the moment the Pas De Deux began…how it got me when I was a kid. It broke my heart and did an echappé all over the pieces. Everything from the visuals to the acting and especially the music still punches me in the feels. For all my gripes about the inconsistent animation, this is the part of the movie where it absolutely shines. And thanks to the ramped up tension that follows every note, I’ve always associated this piece of Tchaikovsky’s score with poignant dramatic moments. Say what you will about the past hour of this movie, it is worth it for this excellent emotional climax.

Fritz bursts into Clara’s room startling her awake and declares Pavlova killed a crooked-tailed mouse by the clockwork castle. Clara dashes downstairs to the toy cabinet but finds Nutcracker is gone. She sprints out of the house straight to Drosselmeier’s shop. Oddly enough, he seems to be expecting her. Clara begs Drosselmeier to tell her if the story about the Nutcracker and the Mouse King is true for the sake of her sanity. But then, a handsome young man enters from the other room.

Drosselmeier introduces him as his nephew, Hans. Despite this apparently being their first time meeting, Hans greets her with familiarity, even bowing to her just as her Nutcracker Prince did. And his voice is one Clara would know anywhere. She in turn gives the perfect response.

“Hello…Nutcracker.”

If the climax already left me nearly speechless than the finale takes whatever little words are left straight from my mouth. As far as endings go it’s near flawless. I’d say The Nutcracker Prince borrowed from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast if it weren’t for the fact that it came out the year before Beauty did. Like The Wizard of Oz, it knows how to leave you on an emotional high note. While it’s supposed to be ambiguous, it’s the kind where deep down you just know the real answer without any explanations given.

“Though I can only imagine how awkward it would have been after she said that if it did turn out to be a dream.”

“SHUT THE FUCK UP CYNICISM YOU WILL NOT RUIN THIS MOMENT FOR ME!!”

And because this was the 90’s, our end credits play over another Oscar-bait power ballad, this one being loosely inspired by the Waltz of the Flowers. Not one of the best, but still a good one to close the film on. Enjoy!

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I honestly feel a little bad critiquing The Nutcracker Prince because at the end of the day it’s a fantasy, and fantasies play by their own emotional nonsensical surrealistic rules. It’d be like if Cinema Sins tried to blast a Jean Cocteau flick (and knowing those bastards’ egos they will if they haven’t already). Sure the characters aren’t the most deep, there’s some fluff in the story that could have been put to better use and the animation is inconsistent (characters go wildly off-model and if you pause at the right moment you’ve got plenty of fodder for the “DIDNEY WORL” meme) but when they get it right it’s wonderful. I’d say this and the obscure stop-motion version done by Sanrio (yes, the Hello Kitty factory) make for the most faithful and interesting retellings of The Nutcracker out there. I credit The Nutcracker Prince along with the Nutcracker Suite segment of Fantasia for introducing me to this magical music and story in the first place. I watched the tape quite a bit up until it got lost in the home entertainment shuffle, and enjoyed seeing it several times on the Disney Channel and Toon Disney during the holidays (and the occasional Christmas in July marathon). It’s not perfect, but hey, it wouldn’t be the holidays if you didn’t enjoy at least one imperfectly animated special that hits you over the head with nostalgia feels. Some people have Rankin-Bass, I have The Nutcracker Prince. And I hope the next generation will embrace it too.

Merry Christmas, and thank you for reading! Do you have a favorite version of The Nutcracker? Let me know in the comments! If you’d like to support me and see more reviews, consider supporting me on Patreon.

I’ll see you in the new year with Abby Kane’s requested review of Disney’s Pinocchio – that is, if my special Christmas present doesn’t keep me from finishing it on time (you’re going down, Ridley!!)

Artwork by Charles Moss.

Christmas Shelf Reviews: The Nutcracker Prince (1990) Merry Christmas everyone! To conclude this month of merrymaking we're looking at an animated Christmas cult classic that I have a bit of a soft spot for.

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theseventhhex · 6 years

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Gulp Interview

Lindsey Leven & Guto Pryce

Photo by Mary Wycherly

Gulp, formed by Super Furry Animals’ Guto Pryce and Lindsey Leven are back with their new album ‘All Good Wishes’. Gulp are on a journey, a state of perpetual transition. The band make mini Kraut-pop epics, informed equally by the sun flares of the Californian desert and the drizzle of pure, sweet Scottish rain and northern light. ‘All Good Wishes’ half-inches its title from a vintage Scottish postcard and it’s emblematic of the changes the pair have undergone. It’s partly a farewell to Wales, and hello to Scotland. The record was largely built in South Wales, a three-year process that saw the band retreat to their basement for endless sonic incisions and revisions. A broader, wider, perhaps bolder experience than their debut, ‘All Good Wishes’ is rooted in fantastic pop songwriting, in creating three minute vignettes that express complex ideas in a simple, accessible and endlessly fascinating way… We talk to Guto about restraint, fatherhood and long drives…

TSH: Did you have the intention of wanting a specific contrast in sound with ‘All Good Wishes’?

Guto: Yes, definitely. We wanted the album to be cohesive as a whole, which meant we were playing around with a lot of ideas in terms of arrangements. A change in instrumentation with this album was important because we wanted to switch things up. I guess this is why we decided to use more synths.

TSH: Were the songs mostly being layered and built up via vocal lines?

Guto: Yes, mostly vocal hooks are often a starting points for us. Then again, at times even a cool synth sound, a beat or a groove can set the tone for a song. It varies all the time and there’s no real set method. Although we didn’t have a drummer this time around so we wrote drum parts that were a lot simpler.

TSH: What lead to you aiming for more restraint within your music?

Guto: After taking a break from Super Furry Animals, I started to play in a band called Spectrum with Sonic Boom from Spacemen 3. I was a huge fan and it was a dream come true to be playing with my favourite band. Anyhow, Sonic Boom uses a lot of restraint, which I really found to be so intriguing. His music is very extreme and it can be very distorted and very repetitive, but I just like the way it cruises. I guess there’s a lot to admire in what you don’t play.

TSH: Was Lindsey focusing on characters with her lyrical perspectives?

Guto: Yeah, she reads a lot and likes to explore the minds of certain characters. Also, both of us share a connection with filmic elements and we wanted to evoke emotions of a road trip and panoramic type of views. We wanted to make something fantastical and create a scene in n a way.

TSH: What do you recall about ‘Beam’ coming together?

Guto: We really enjoyed forming this track. Mixing a traditional folk/60s type of song with synths was a nice direction to take. You know, ‘Beam’ is quite a simple song but we wanted to make it unique. We could have done it in a reverb drenched 60s type of way, but we wanted to experiment and make it distinct. I really enjoyed the tremolo guitar inclusion. Also, we wanted to bring to mind a Vangelis Blade Runner type of feel - you’re not sort of sure when it’s set - it feels like it’s from the future, yet it echoes to the past too.

TSH: Tell us more about ‘Claudia’ being in relation to a comic book that was picked up in New York...

Guto: Yeah, you get all these small comic stores in New York. When you go to the till there’s a pile of hand drawn comics available. I guess aspiring artists put them there for you to take, but it’s all quite anonymous as to whose put them there. Also, this was pre-internet days and you couldn’t just Google an artist’s name. Anyhow, it was something Lindsey picked up. The comic is long lost and the main character didn’t have a name, but she tried to catch the moon so Lindsey named her Claudia.

TSH: How did you feel overall having sat on this record for quite a while before releasing it?

Guto: Yeah, it took three years from when we began recording to actually releasing it. It’s been a year since it’s been mixed and we’ve been living with it for a long time. We’ve released it on our own label without a huge machine behind us, but we like it this way. I’m really proud of this album and it kind of feels funny being so familiar with something and then letting it go. Essentially, we make music for ourselves more than anything, but we do appreciate it being out there for others to interpret in their own ways.

TSH: Do you find that residing in Scotland gives you a particular type of outlook on life?

Guto: Yeah, totally. Scotland is such a big country with so little people. Even if you take a drive five minutes out of town you find yourself on an empty road. Oh, and the light here is amazing! It’s so different to the west coast of Wales where I’m from, which is dramatic and rainy. Scotland reminds me of America. I don’t know what makes the sky so big but it seems to be the case out here all of the time.

TSH: What are the most rewarding aspects of fatherhood?

Guto: It’s amazing to see the instinctive joy that music brings to a baby. Whenever music is played his attention is immediately drawn to it, with smiles. Baby smiles are the best!

TSH: How do you like to obtain a positive state of mind outside of music?

Guto: Going for a long drive in beautiful scenery is always good. The ocean and mountains put everything into perspective.

TSH: What are your interests when you’re not engaged in music?

Guto: Real ale.

TSH: Finally, what are the main features that you want to maintain with future Gulp material?

Guto: To continue exploring the fantasy sounds and songs in our heads. We have a lot of ideas that we have yet to translate into recordings.

Gulp - “I Dream Of Your Song”

Gulp - “Morning Velvet Sky”

All Good Wishes

#Interview #Gulp #Guto Pryce #Super Furry Animals

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artbystephfrances · 3 years

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Elizabeth Benjamin: Dada and Existentialism: The Authenticity of Ambiguity.

In this text comprised by Elizabeth Benjamin, the ideologies of 20th century European Avant-Garde are explored in conversation with Dadaism and Existentialism. While these ideas are not necessarily related to my practice, Benjamin articulates the relationship between the two and how it prompts themes such as alienation, responsibility, freedom and truth. I found this intriguing as these themes are associated with the memory of traumatic experiences. While the Dada movement has influenced my artistic practice, existentialism has given me insight into human existence and individuality, which is a significant component in creating a nostalgic experience. In the chapter ‘Alienation and Reality in Dada Film’, Benjamin investigates filmic identity and cinematic experience within the Dada movement. From my previous knowledge and research into Dada, this movement was substantial for its immersive experiences and perceptions. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre discusses the notion of the past, present and future within Dada cinema;

“le passé n’est plus, l’avenir n’est pas encore, quant au présent instantané, chacun sait bien qu’il n’est pas du tout, il est la limite d’une division infinie, comme le point sans dimension” which translates to “the past is no longer, the future is not yet, and as for the immediate present, it is well known that it is not at all, it is the limit of an infinite division, like a dimensionless point”.

This has almost become a ‘mantra’ for my artistic endeavours within this journal, as my concepts function as a timeless, yet nostalgic experience that allows viewers to delve into my mind and live through a filmic revisioning of traumatic memories. Benjamin further explains the impact of cinematic representation, referring to Dada film as “an abstract assemblage of flickering fragments, diaphanous distortion and constructed continuity”. This is a exemplification of how I would describe my current work, as I intend to visually convey how memories interconnect and warp our perception of time.

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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How Clarice Continues Agent Starling’s Story

https://ift.tt/37cOLgW

In 1991 The Silence of the Lambs became a phenomenon; cleaning up at the box office, winning all five major Academy Awards (Best Film, Director, Screenplay, Actress, and Actor) and turning both of its lead characters into overnight icons. But while antagonist Hannibal Lecter has scarcely been away from our screens, the steely yet vulnerable hero of the film, Clarice Starling, only reappeared in the poorly received 2001 sequel Hannibal. Even Bryan Fuller’s cult classic TV adaptation of Thomas Harris’ source material novels couldn’t use Clarice due to complicated divisions of the rights.

But now Clarice is back, headlining a new CBS drama that picks up where The Silence of the Lambs left off and charts the next stages of the young agent’s career. For fans of the film it’s an enticing proposition, albeit one that has to contend with the inverse of the rights situation that plagued Fuller’s show; Clarice can use any character that originated in The Silence of the Lambs, but none from the rest of Harris’ works, meaning that Hannibal Lecter is nowhere to be seen.

In some ways this is a blessing in disguise, allowing Clarice to chart its own path. The early episodes of the show demonstrate a commitment to Clarice’s point of view, paying tribute to what came before but never losing sight of whose story this is. We sat down with showrunner Elizabeth Klaviter to explore the genesis of the show, how she interpreted Thomas Harris’ world and characters, the challenges of reimagining a beloved icon, and what the series has in store going forward.

Den of Geek: Seeing Clarice Starling back on screen is a real thrill. Can you talk us through the genesis and development of the series?

Elizabeth Klaviter: Creators Alex Kurzman and Jenny Lumet both started asking themselves the question, “Where’s Clarice Starling now? What happened to her after The Silence of the Lambs when she was no longer in Quantico? And how did she deal with the trauma of Buffalo Bill’s basement while she was still a cadet?” Jenny is the most obsessed, amazing Thomas Harris fan and has an encyclopedic knowledge of all of his books completely available to her at any moment, just through her brain. It’s incredible. She was like, “I want to know what it looks like if Clarice and Ardelia live together? I want to know if they share shoes? Who does Clarice love? What does that look like? What does she eat for breakfast? How does she go through the world being Clarice Starling?”

So the two of them were really asking themselves that question in a deep and rich way. And then we were in the middle of a feminist revolution with the #MeToo movement and those things intersected. When Jodie Foster talks about reading the script and deciding to take the role, she has said “this is the story of a woman who is saving a woman in a well.” And that was revolutionary. That is revolutionary. It goes against the stories that we’ve heard since the dawn of time, since human beings were telling stories to each other.

It seemed like the cable space would be the most logical place for the advancement of Clarice’s journey, but David Nevins at CBS was really interested in putting it on network television, where it could shine and be unique. And he said, “if you will be our partner in putting this on network television then we’ll give you guys creative freedom.” And that has definitely been true. They’ve been our true partner; incredibly collaborative, incredibly generous, and really supportive of Alex and Jenny’s vision of the show moving forward.

Outside of The Silence of the Lambs, Clarice has previously only reappeared in the novel/film Hannibal, which is largely built around her getting kicked down again and again. How important was it to you guys to see Clarice have some genuine successes?

One of the most fascinating junctures in a person’s life, but especially a woman’s life, is moving forward from being in school to being a professional. What does that look like? How do you carry yourself? How do you answer the questions of your childhood? How do they inform who you are? And then you get pushback to be maybe a different kind of person, to work harder, or to make sacrifices that maybe you don’t want to make as a professional, let alone an FBI agent who is constantly dealing with morality, ethics, and justice. So, I think that’s a particularly exciting time for a woman’s life.

It translates to the year that we set the show in, in 1993, but also really to today, particularly as it affects both our Clarice storyline, but also Ardelia’s storyline, which grows and becomes much more significant, both in relation to Clarice and also in her own right as the series progresses. In The Silence of the Lambs Clarice was still a student, still studying; she was close to graduation, but she wasn’t there yet. And this is the first time we’re really getting to see the beginning of who she is as an FBI agent.

This is the second TV adaptation of Thomas Harris’s properties, and Hannibal did garner quite an intense cult following. Did you feel any pressure following not only that series, but also being a direct sequel to one of the greatest films of all time?

Thomas Harris created amazing characters who are complex, who have a variety of drives and nuanced motivations. So I feel like anybody who gets to play in the Thomas Harris sandbox has to A) be a fan, and B) feel the pressure and the responsibility that brings. But there’s another thing that it brings, which is pure joy and delight.

Clarice: How Does The Show Compare to Hannibal?

By Gabriel Bergmoser

Everybody who is involved in this show on every level, from our costume designer to our production designer, have all studied in the library of Thomas Harris. And also Jonathan Demme and his extraordinary visuals and filmic language. We really wanted to bring to life all of the textures of Thomas Harris’s work; the opulence, the extraordinary lavish visuals of his imagination, and most importantly, I think, the characters.

On that, let’s talk about Paul Krendler. In the source material Krendler is a lot more overtly slimy and antagonistic towards Clarice, particularly in the novel Hannibal. At least in the first three episodes of the show, he comes off more as a tough but fair boss who Clarice is slowly warming towards. Can you talk a little bit about the change to his character from the text to the show and what the impetus for that was?

I think a lot of it had to do with the question of who we’re spending time with. Certainly fans know where Krendler ends up; we all know his outcome in Hannibal, that his character gets progressively more awful and he ends up having a fitting demise. So we’re putting together this team on the show and have to ask if we want this awful, badly intended character in such close proximity to Clarice while she’s fighting monsters.

We honor his history having been in the Department of Justice, but now we’ve brought him back to the FBI and given him a backstory that he was formally in that FBI before he went to the DOJ. Then we explored “what drives this man? When is he wrong-headed? And when is he right-headed?” And the answer that we all really enjoyed is, this is a man who is trying to keep his unit safe, who wants everybody to come home tonight.

That means that Clarice can’t explore this case in the way that she wants to; to just run off and use her intellect to solve the crime and get an audience with the bad guy in a potentially unsafe way. Now she’s in the bigger world, and she’s having to learn what the rules are and how she has to function within them. Now when we talk about Krendler and his future, we’re not certain where we’re going. We don’t know who he will become in seven seasons because we have seven years until he ends up being the man in Hannibal.

So, in the minds of the writers’ room, are the events of Hannibal still off in the future, or is this potentially a re-imagining of where Clarice might have gone next after The Silence of the Lambs?

We don’t have the answer to that question yet. Nothing is out of the realm of possibility right now. We definitely are going to honor Thomas Harris, look at the path and see how it goes. I mean, Ardelia is in the book Hannibal, and there are some really interesting details. She and Clarice end up living together in that book, or not living together, but owning condos that are like a duplex together. And so there are definitely moments of characterization that we draw from, from that book. Then we’ll see where we get. And we should be so lucky that we have seven seasons to fully answer that question.

The show so far moves between more a traditional case of the week stories and this overarching conspiracy plot. How do you work in the writers’ room to balance that?

It’s my favorite kind of storytelling to have a balance between those two things. I’m a huge X-Files fan, and they definitely had their overarching serialized plot. But the episodes I always responded to the most were the monsters of the week. I’m a sucker for a good monster of the week story. I’m also obsessed with, not just seasons, but series-long arcs for characters; with personal growth and character relationship growth. So, putting those two things together is my personal sweet spot. I feel like as long as the story that you’re telling for your case of the week is truly compelling and you’re honoring where the character journey is, you can organically bring the audience on a journey that includes both. It just takes some attention.

Rebecca Breeds does such a fantastic job as Clarice. Her work feels of a piece with what Jodie Foster did, but also very distinct. Was there a lot of discussion about where the line should be drawn between impersonating Foster but doing something new as well?

Rebecca had her finger on the pulse of that from, really, her audition. She was stunning. I think it was a last-minute decision for her to add an Appalachian accent. She added the accent and then she said, “I just found Clarice.” And for all of us, the reason why we’re all showing up to work every day is because we’re incredible fans of Thomas Harris’s universe. His novels, yes, but also the movie. Jodie Foster is an incredible actor who gave an incredible performance and really embodied this character. So, honoring Jodie and her performance has always been paramount in all of our minds and yet we need to move forward and fully embrace Clarice as our own. And for us; for Alex, Jenny, myself, and Rebecca, the answer to that question has always been a truthfulness in writing and then a truthfulness in acting. That if the moments are real and genuine and fully present for all of us, then it becomes its own thing. It takes on its own life.

Due to the rights situation Hannibal Lecter is a notable absence, but in some ways a bigger one is Jack Crawford, who fulfilled the mentor role to Clarice in The Silence of the Lambs. Did you feel in any way limited by not being able to use him?

It’s interesting to look at the events of The Silence of the Lambs and the relationship with Crawford purely from Clarice’s point of view. For me, that relationship became caught up in the trauma. I feel like we are honoring his presence in her life, but in a very unpredictable way. When she went to see Hannibal, I feel like she was being given, yes, one of the most exciting opportunities of her life, but also being thrown into the deep end of the pool. And that’s part of what she carries with her. One of the definitions of trauma is “too much too fast”.

Clarice got too much, too fast, and now she’s unraveling that. So to my mind Crawford is a part of that. And that is how we’re paying tribute to him in our show. That’s how we’re thinking of him. And then to your point earlier, I feel some of the more mentor pieces of Crawford have become part of the Krendler character and will grow their relationship. It’ll have a lot of ups and downs, of course. But I think there are pieces of him in her relationship with Krendler.

One of the complex things about the relationship with Crawford is the fact that it is inherently built on an act of manipulation. He sends her in without giving her an agenda so that he can try to coax information out of Lecter.

And later when she needs back up they’re all the way across the nation. To me, that’s also part of the male gaze. They asked her to go do this thing and then they didn’t listen to her. They just missed a lot of it. The way that has translated into our world is in the exploration of bosses asking young women to do things, and then maybe not listening to all of the answers or the pieces of the answers that are inconvenient for them even though they’re honest and truthful. It’s definitely something that we explore in the series.

Something that’s refreshing about the show is the fact that it’s a period piece but never feels like it’s hitting you over the head with the 90s setting. What kind of discussions did you have about engaging with the time period?

We talk about it quite a bit. And of course there are all the practical conversations about making sure that the items that we’re using are accurate and the cars for those periods are correct. As we’re moving forward, there are more details that we’re drawing specifically from the FBI in 1993. We talk a lot about how our world view has and hasn’t shifted since 1993. An example would be how does the Waco siege inform the standoff at Novak’s in episode two. Who are these FBI agents, were they at Waco, were their friends at Waco, were they heard at Waco? What were their feelings from there and how did those attitudes inform this?

Movies

The Silence of the Lambs and Clarice’s Lifelong Battle Against the Male Gaze

By David Crow

Movies

Hannibal: Did Author Thomas Harris Try to Destroy Dr. Lecter?

By Don Kaye

In the world of the show Ruth Martin is the first female Attorney General, and that creates more pressure for her. And the FBI has a legacy that was started with J. Edgar Hoover, which is filled with white supremacy. It’s hard to succeed there if you aren’t a white man. So, those are ways that it informs it. Lucca De Oliveira (Tomas Esquivel) showed up on-set one day and he called me and he’s looking around and seeing all of our extras being white and said; “it makes me feel so other”. Those are the ways that we started really exploring what it means to be in 1993. And we’re shooting those from the perspective of the non-white characters.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Going forward, what can fans expect to see from the show?

We will watch all of our characters get to know each other better and get to know themselves much better, particularly Clarice. Clarice goes on quite a turbulent journey of self-discovery. We really enter very deeply into Clarice’s relationship with Ardelia and what the differences in their worlds are as they’re learning. What it means to be a Black female agent, and what it means to be a white female agent, and how those two things are very different. We get to meet some more monsters and some of those monsters are vanquished quickly within an episode, and some of them will be around with us for the entire season.

The post How Clarice Continues Agent Starling’s Story appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3keOGit

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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outerdreamspace · 3 years

Video

vimeo

2015 film-essay edited from the following material (as per the guidelines of my undergraduate module)

Le Cinema à Vapeur, compilation of films by the Lumière brothers (André S. Labarthe, 1995)

Une Séance Méliès, compilation of films by Georges Méliès (Jacques Meny, 1997)

North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)

Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973)

Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata, 1988)

The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993)

Monsoon Wedding (Mira Nair, 2001)

Transcript available after this essay.

Audiovisual Criticism: reflective disclosure

My Audiovisual Criticism film-essay is called reflective disclosure, as it is an experimentation on film’s phenomenological nature. An initial approach to this piece was inspired by Edward S. Small’s enquiry: “could images themselves provide high level cognitive functions, functions that could bypass the potentially muddy mediation of linguistic signs?” (1994: 6). Mixing elements of direct and written theory, I based my research on some fragments of the footage that was available to us (module guidelines), disregarding any narrative continuity. The progress and interpretations of this experiment are consigned in written form, hence completing the circle of direct and written theory. I will analyse my research on the notion of filmic experience, and how these experiments led me to insightful discoveries on disclosure and world experiencing through filmic language. These notions stem from phenomenology, and in particular Martin Heidegger’s works— the terminology used here takes his research as a point of reference. An individual’s experience of what is happening in the world, their acknowledgement of what the world discloses can be understood as world experiencing. My permanent search of disclosure is thus an application of ‘aletheia’, or ‘the state of becoming non-hidden, the opening towards the world’, which in turn feeds back into our world experiencing.

After defining my theme in phenomenology, I started to build my piece by using physical fragments to develop new “semiological value” (Roland Barthes, 1972: 136)— I use the term ‘physical fragments’ to encompass video, audio, stills, and words that I extracted from films and readings. I followed my instinctual fascination with a few close-ups and scenes, and soon remarked that similarities were appearing across the films. I isolated and regrouped those fragments, breaking any narrative flow they belonged in: I could now work with the haunted look on a face, the reaching hands, the playful gaze, the flow of people, or the busy streets. With the same process as Fabrice Mathieu’s In the Shadow (2011), I collected visual fragments that became connected in the light of my experiment. I started to assemble the clips and words through superimposition in a palimpsest collage, creating ‘clusters of meaning’. Small explains that:

[Articulation] attends to those joints that constitute any connected parts—such as the phonemes of speech […]. And cinesemiotics was to find some such articulation in the system of motions pictures precisely where Eisenstein had found it decades before—within the montaged interstices that are the foundation of Metz’s grande syntagmatique. (1994: 9)

Black screens were useful to frame my ‘clusters’ and articulate meaning, which I later seamed with audio fragments. Through this collage, film semiotics revealed themselves to me— the phenomenological nature of my theme put the state of experiencing in focus, revealing itself in the fragments I selected, therefore shifting the visuals’ original meaning to an iconographical one. As Jean Epstein says, “[a close-up] has the air of an idea” (1988: 239). My fascination with some close-ups (or reframing of fragments on a detail) was motivated by this intimacy and raw feeling they produce. This iconographic language was made meaningful by the contrast and effect between the fragments (flashing, dissolving, superimposed, reframed), the resulting friction bringing them to disclosure: “each sign or symbol articulates one’s phenomenology in a distinct manner […]” (Small, 1994: 8).

With cinesemiotics and a sense of experiencing starting to disclose itself on the screen, I explored the possibilities montage gave me. It allowed for more depth to the “ideological substance” (Barthes, 1972: 136) of my piece, which was quickly defining itself as my interpretation of the fragments’ new meaning influenced my actions. Following Jean-Luc Godard’s All the (hi)stories (1998), I gained depth through a non-linear, vertical montage. It allowed a polyphony of voices and sounds to guide the audience through this reflective experiencing my piece was starting to show. Walter Murch explains that:

The tension produced by the metaphoric distance between sound and image serves somewhat the same purpose, creatively, as the perceptual tension produced by the physical distance between our two eyes […]. The brain is not content with this close duality and searches for something that would resolve and unify those differences. And it finds it in the concept of depth. (1994: xx)

This concept of ‘metaphorical distance’, coincidentally, translated itself several times in my piece. I used spoken-word passages in French (from the Lumière footage’s voiceover) as a link unifying the several segments of my piece— their first purpose was to resonate with the images on the screen, but they eventually added some distance between their theoretical nature and the images’ visual processing. Through this depth, both generated new interpretations of each other (e.g. “the camera gaze” coinciding with an extreme close-up of half-hidden eyes). In the last segment of my piece, the rail tracks become double as if the viewers’ eyes cross, reminiscent of the focus jump between depths of meaning— the original, the connotative, the reflection on new possibilities offered by the audiovisual medium, the audiovisual self-reflection on ourselves… The simultaneous elements on screen are made sense of in our mind, corresponding to Barthes’ theory that “concept, […] appears in global fashion, it is a kind of nebula, the condensation, more or less hazy, of a certain knowledge. Its elements are linked by associative relations: it is supported [by a depth, its] mode of presence is memorial” (1972: 120-121). The ‘physical fragments’ together became fragments of the self, a glimpse into the world experiencing I was researching in cinema; the way they work together making apparent the concept of disclosure and synchronicity. Film reveals itself as a language of signs and an experiencing that are disclosed through montage: “its major function is […] to theorize upon its own substance by reflecting back on its own intrinsic semiotic system(s)” (Small, 1994: 5).

After my initial experimentations on film phenomenology, I reflected upon which notions in particular were governing my reasoning. I thus concentrated my efforts on making abstract concepts such as disclosure and synchronicity (in our world experiencing) visible. This notion of synchronicity, which became visible through editing, is inspired from Carl Jung’s work. Joseph Cambray qualified this synchronicity as:

Disparate elements without apparent connection [brought] together or juxtaposed in a manner that tends to shock or surprise the mind, rendering it open to new possibilities, for a broadening of the view of the world, offering a glimpse of the interconnected fabric of the universe. (2009: 31)

Through my initial isolation, classification and then superimposition of acausally related visuals, some recurrences of ‘meaningful coincidences’ started to manifest— and this regardless of temporal or spatial origins. I carried on interconnecting these frameworks of (synchronicity, disclosure, world experiencing) to see what they could generate while they melded. Direct theory being reflective in nature, I pushed it towards the limits of self-reflectivity through mythical layers of meaning (as explained by Barthes):

In myth there are two semiological systems, one of which is staggered in relation to the other: a linguistic system, the language (or the modes of representation which are assimilated to it), which I shall call the language-object, because it is the language which myth gets hold of in order to build its own system; and myth itself, which I shall call metalanguage, because it is a second language, in which one speaks about the first. (1972: 113-114)

I experimented on the cinematic language-object (through the search for new semiological value) and the cinematic metalanguage (through the depth in ideological substance) thus letting me access two other planes of meaning. The first one concerns the possibilities of audiovisual thinking, which in turn brings a second disclosure: how humanity indexes its world experiencing, giving filmmaking the power to shape and catalyse the collective unconscious. Links and similarities reveal themselves through the layering of different times and spaces, for both fictional and non-fictional film fragments: it is proof of the synchronicity between each individual’s world experiencing, as well as a direct opening in humanity’s organisation of memories (collective unconscious). Some fragments are deeply lodged in there, be it the plane chase scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest (1959) or the intimacy of a hundred faces’ layered close-ups. The possibilities offered by audiovisual thinking are still being experimented on. It is logical to expect new insights from another type of thinking when researching a subject— as Small indicates, “Eisenstein […] began his writings with this very vision, his quest for a cinematographic analogue to philosophical discourse” (Small, 1994: 5). Audiovisual thinking, and experimental films as ‘direct theory’ provide a new take on the ontological questions experiencing brings out, thus most self-reflectively disclosing new answers. This film-essay could be considered as an audiovisual form which frames the transformations of materials when they undergo various treatments, or how the mind processes and associates audiovisual information: either while putting together the film-essay; or, also, as a self-reflection on humanity’s world experiencing (governed by the recorded synchronicity transcending time and space), then humanity’s processing of memories into the collective unconscious.

To conclude, redacting this piece completed the film’s movement towards self-reflection: the use of a mimetic criticism to reflect on film experiencing and disclosure, mirroring the audience’s own world experiencing. Very experimental but nonetheless insightful, this Audiovisual Criticism piece helped me put abstract theories into concrete applications. As Small explains, “the Greek ethymology for theory is, after all, hardly intrinsic to verbal discourse: theoria, ‘a looking at’” (1994: 6). By coming back to Ancient Greek principles such as those reused in phenomenology (disclosure or ‘aletheia’), the emphasis on visual and aural perception were able to, without a doubt, broaden my understanding of film’s nature.

Bibliography

Barthes, Roland, (1972) Mythologies, Translated from French by Lavers, Annette, New York: The Noonday Press (first published: 1957)

Cambray, Joseph, (2009) Synchronicity: nature and psyche in an interconnected universe, USA: Texas A&M University Press

Epstein, Jean, (1988) “Magnification” from Abel, Richard French film theory and criticism: a history/anthology, 1907-1939, Vol. 1, 1097-1929 pp. 235-241, Princetown, N.J: Princetown University Press

Murch, Walter, (1994) “Foreword” from Chion, Michel; edited and translated by

Gorbman, Claudia, Audio-vision: sound on screen pp. vii-xxiv, Chichester: Columbia University Press

Small, Edward S, (1994) “Experimental Film/Video as Direct Theory” from Small, Edward S, Direct Theory: experimental film/video as major genre pp. 1-11, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press

Filmography

Mathieu, Fabrice, (2011) Dans l’ombre / In the Shadow, [Vimeo] Available at: http://vimeo.com/23200726 , last accessed 15/07/2014

Toutes les histoires [All the (hi)stories], (1998) Directed by Godard, Jean-Luc, [DVD]

North by Northwest, (1959) Directed by Hitchcock, Alfred, [DVD]

Translated transcript of the French footage

00:03 — The image comes into life.

00:33 — Randomness.

Randomness?

Yes. Randomness and reality. Are they more talented than all of the world’s filmmakers?

00:41 • RANDOMNESS

00:44 — This gaze that we call a camera-gaze, this gaze is felt as a paradox of perception. A semantic incongruity that thwarts the operator’s strategy and the collaborative discipline of the mise-en-scène. As if a speck of reality had suddenly escaped from the centrifugal force that ensures its cohesion.

01:03 • TIME

01:33 — Because intimates wander in time.

01:38 • SPACE

02:13 — To travel back in time and approach the founding myths, the filmmaker borrows from theatre its art of the fake and its naive clichés.

03:03 — Cinema altered us.

03:16 — These animated photographs hardly have time to surprise us that they then charge themselves with a past they ignored. In truth we look with our ears, and we listen with our memory.

03:39 — Our eyes have come back from everything. Each of these images awaken multitudes in the same way a train now always conceals another, which conceals another… Also, didn’t the magnetic snow that accompanies us in our sleep get the best of the back nothingness from which arose the first films of the Lumière cinematograph?

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theneulithium · 3 years

Text

2020.02.16 - The Art of Captioning

//Nicky Ni

This past week, I dabbled in the world of subtitles and closed captions. Wondering what the difference is? It’s simple: subtitles are translation of the spoken dialogs only, and hence are for people who cannot understand the language. Closed captions, on the other hand, are intended for viewers who cannot hear the audio, and therefore also include notations of important sound effects, such as [dog barking], [music playing🎵] etc.; “closed” captioning, as opposed to “open,” indicates that the captions are on a separate track and can be turned on and off. If you want to know how I ended up here, let me tell you, it all began with a random Muppets video that I saw on YouTube, which I will show you in just a little bit.

Just about a year ago, when Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s new film Parasite (2020) won a surprise Best Picture—rather than the Best Foreign Film—Academy Award, it also inevitably reignited the discussion around subtitles vs. dubbing. Shot completely in Korean, Parasite would have to meet its audience either with English subtitles or dubbed English voice-over. Prior to the Oscar win, the filmmaker’s Golden Globes acceptance speech, in which he said that “once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films,” seemed to be an attempt to appease American viewers’ discomfort against subtitled foreign films.

Up until now, little did I know that subtitles are a lot less popular here in the U.S. than I realized. Growing up in China and exposed to a lot of foreign films that were circulated in the gray market as barely adequately captioned DVDs, I find myself lucky to have always seen subtitles as an essential part of the film-viewing experience. In other words, I am very accustomed to having typed words at the bottom of the screen that indicates that a dialog is happening. If they block the images, it is a OK; if heavy reading distracts me from admiring the actresses and actors, I rewind and watch that part again. Subtitles/captions relax me; they provide a sense of reassurance, guaranteeing that I understand the dialogs full well in case my listening comprehension glitches out. On the flip side, though, with the concept of having subtitles “burned-in” to my brain, I remained somewhat negligent of the extent to which subtitles/captions do and can do. Having viewed captions solely as a utility item prevents me from noticing some of their unique characteristics. And it is for this serendipitous revelation that I began to dig further into the land of subtitles/captions. In this blog, I want to show you a few surprising examples (which also provide general access, hence, sorry Godard) in both art and popular culture that evoke subtitles with intentionality and creativity.

The Dutch duo Metahaven has always been vocal about subtitles. Releasing a lot of moving-image works—from feature films to music videos—that involve multiple languages, Metahaven looks at subtitles from a design theorist’s perspective and discusses their role in mutating speech, meaning, viewing experience and even the digital file format.

Metahaven at MoMA on Subtitles. Tumblr. 04/30/2019.

Next, a video essay by Thomas Flight that discusses the use of translation as a filmic technique that accentuates human-animal communication—or the lack thereof—in Wes Anderson’s recent film, Isle of Dogs (2018). The director did a fantastic job navigating between text translations, intentionally untranslated conversations, and real-time translation done by the characters, to create a film that uses a foreign language as dramaturgic tool to delay or further the narrative. However, its anglo-centric shortcoming also lies therein: the director’s ideal viewer is someone who cannot understand Japanese and could therefore share this frustration of the dogs trying to understand humans (in this case, the dogs speak English and their masters Japanese). However, this empathy is severely squashed for someone who can understand both languages, leaving behind only comical confusion.

youtube

And at last, in this episode featuring The Swedish Chef of The Muppets, the invisible person who painstakingly transcribes the Chef’s gibberish into some nonsensical captions that resemble Swedish also begins to “talk” directly to the viewer via the captions midway through the video (in order to see this, make sure that you have your “cc” button on). Indeed, producing subtitles can be quite lonely and frustrating sometimes, especially when you don’t understand the language!

youtube

In the process of my research, I encountered a nice book, Reading Sounds: Closed-Captioned Media and Popular Culture (2016), by Sean Zdenek, Professor of technical and professional writing at University of Delaware. The book provides much of what you want to know about closed captioning and argues that closed captioning can be beneficial for both hard-of-hearing and hearing people. What’s more relevant to today’s post is in Chapter 9, “the future of close captioning,” an abstract of which is nicely reproduced to the author’s blog with .GIF demonstrations. The chapter talks about innovative closed captioning cases that incorporate digital designs and animations to enhance the viewing experience. I strongly encourage that you read this post, “Subtitles as Visual Art.”

A scene from Russian film Night Watch (2007) by Timur Bekmambetov. .GIF reproduced from Sean Zdenek’s blog post “Subtitles as Visual Art,” Reading Sounds, 10/18/2015.

And of course, such “image-text collaboration” is also explored in-depth in Sherlock, where texting—an activity generally hard to portray on a screen—is very efficiently conveyed through creative post production.

A scene from “A Study in Pink” (S1E1) in Sherlock (2010) directed by Paul McGuigan.

That’s all for today. I hope you enjoyed :)

#captioning #closed captions #subtitles #film #visual art

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timswezy · 4 years

Text

Thoughts on Tales From the Loop

While I was already a big fan of Simon Stålenhag’s paintings, the prospect of an anthology like show gave me pause. All too often, especially when translating artworks from one medium/domain to another, there’s a tendency to make literal and concrete what was just a hint or metaphor in the original; questions are answered but unartfully so or are at best too rigidly defined.

TL;DR: if Ingmar Bergman had created the SyFy show Eureka, the result would be something almost but not quite entirely unlike Tales From the Loop.

. . .

I’m happy to say that this wasn’t the case with Tales from the Loop, Amazon’s new anthology cum 8 hour movie cum miniseries. The figurative hands of the emotional feel of the paintings grasped tightly with those of the uniquely detailed sci-fi worldbuilding creates an exquisite construction, assembled like fine clockwork but set behind a darkly clouded glass. We know there’s more going than a superficial observance would reveal, but we simultaneously aren’t allowed to see it while being given the very distinct impression that to really see the man behind the curtain would be to rob the work of its sense of wonder and mystery.

It’s another positive that while some questions are answered, many more are not, including those that the typical canonically oriented skiffy production would seem to require in order to be “good”. As someone who went to art school ultimately with the pretense of wanting to be an illustrator, I understand too well the desire to fully flesh out one’s creations, dotting every “i” and crossing every “t” so that nothing is left for ambiguity where the viewer can participate in the work by filling details in on their own, privately. It’s nice to watch a production of this scale and scope while not having every detail, both little and big ones, explicitly laid out for me on a slab in the analytical portions of my brain.

Then there’s the Swedish/Scandinavian-ness of it all: its slow, deliberate pace, the washed out palette of a land with a midnight sun (though taking place in Ohio by way of Canada), and the complex emotional interiors of the often melancholic main characters. These are all qualities found in the original paintings, but it’s an amazing example of craftsmanship that the people working on this series were able to pull it off.

While not a time travel story per de, issues around time, memories, and change are all present. The result is one of the clearest depictions I’ve seen of the shared space of concepts which orbit around nostalgia but that are not found in the English language:

- lacrimae rerun (Latin)

- mono no aware (Japanese)

- saudade (Portuguese/Spanish)

- sehnsucht (German)

- ubi sunt (Latin)

- weltsherz (German)

All are centered around ideas of memory and nostalgia but differ in their specific relationship to the human experience, its objects and subjects. That this crosshatched space is where the show establishes itself is what makes it so enjoyable to me, a cool breeze on a mild autumn day, where there’s just a hint of the winter to come.

This is also what makes the show difficult if not unwatchable for some folks, much like the works of Ingmar Bergman, himself a Swede. There’s very little physical action in the genre filmic sense, but a great amount of emotional conflicts, both internal and external to the characters. Nothing is really resolved at the end and there isn’t really a traditional story structure to speak of but for me that is an asset. At a time when most mass culture SF seeks to define things to a microscopic detail and sometimes seem more concerned with debating the vagaries of canonicity and casting choices, Tales From the Loop gives us the time to contemplate it, privately filling in the details for ourselves and leaving the door open for many further explorations of this world the creators have made.

#tales from the loop #prime video #amazon prime video #scifi #science fiction #review #mass culture #pop culture

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decuir-international · 6 years

Text

Don’t Believe in Subversion

Subversion is in the content, in the style, in the form. It lies on the surface and the practice of the image, in the visuals and the principles ordering them as a sequence. Subversion is in thinking cinema, it is in sensing cinema.

The first major critical study of subversion in cinema is Film as a Subversive Art. It was 1974 when the first edition of Amos Vogel’s book came out – numerous editions and translations quickly followed (in French in 1977, in German in 1979), making the volume something of a classic in accounts of avant-gardism in cinema, a classic of subversion. This might sound contradictory: how can something subversive in and of itself, something overcoming the constraints of the canon, be a classic? This is one of the fascinating aspects of the relationship between cinema and the idea of subversion, and one of the questions this curatorial project addresses. Vogel’s book is then the anchor of this exhibition, not only because of its iconic status as a critical work but because it connects cinematic subversion in the former Eastern European sphere to international currents through the use of an image from Dušan Makavejev’s subversive masterpiece WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) on the cover.

This exhibition aims at following such a two-fold path, by offering a synthetic survey charting international histories of cinematic subversion. The concept is focused on presenting classical examples from the ex-Yugoslav region and connecting them to their counterparts in other regions, putting them in dialogue with other international practitioners. Inspired by unexpected continuities, by visual, symbolic, and conceptual echoes, the moving image component of the exhibition forwards the idea of subversion by coupling a number of works on the basis of their shared, albeit profoundly multifaceted, radical attitude. Because we believe cinematic subversion overcomes medium-specific constraints the exhibition is cross-disciplinary, including not only films and videos, but also books, new media, and more.

DON’T BELIEVE IN SUBVERSION

(an exhibition curated by Greg de Cuir Jr & Miriam de Rosa)

The title of the exhibition references an early kino club film by Makavejev titled Don’t Believe in Monuments (1958, 5 min., film transferred to video, collection AFC Belgrade). This film was banned for a number of years due to its heavy eroticism and also the erroneous belief that the statue that the woman makes love to in the film depicted a wounded Partisan fighter. It did not – lending credence to Makavejev’s polemical title and also encouraging us to take a skeptical, self-critical stance to the very ideological construction of this exhibition. We have drawn a parallel to Makavejev’s film with fragments from the film Consumer Art (1972, 1974-1975, 16 min., 16mm transferred to video, courtesy of lokal_30, Warsaw) by the uncompromising Polish feminist artist Natalia LL. Her erotic images of various women (including herself) consuming edible items in overtly suggestive ways comments on the nature of consumer culture in Socialist Poland while also subverting the use value of everyday groceries.

The film Scusa Signorina (1963, 7 min., 16mm transferred to video, collection HFS Zagreb) by Mihovil Pansini is the anthemic example of antifilm, which Pansini initiated and theorized as subverting and ultimately negating the very idea of cinema and cinema aesthetics. We have linked Pansini’s work with the video Scanner Pack (2017, 7 min., video, courtesy of the artist) by the Ecuadorian-Spanish artist Karla Tobar Abarca. The artist was kind enough to accept our invitation and to edit a new cut of her video in direct response to Scusa Signorina. The installation of this video therefore serves as its premiere. These two works offer a complementary interpretation of the coordinates characterising the position of the camera in space, and its corporeality and relationship to the filmmaker’s body. Worn pointing backwards, Pansini’s camera explores the city of Zagreb, unveiling overlooked details, showing unfamiliar perspectives employed to frame the urban space. Conversely, Abarca’s Scanner Pack, also meant to be worn pointing backwards, but in fact subverting such an orientation, embodies a hacking system that disrupts the way in which we navigate that same urban space. The back pack employs a scanning technology device to focus on the physical contact, the materiality, and the surfaces of the city.

The film Blue Rider (1964, 12 min., 16mm transferred to video, collection AFC Belgrade) by Tomislav Gotovac is subversive cinema by way of subversive action. The artist’s legendary strategy of entering various cafes in Belgrade unannounced and confronting the clientele and staff with a film camera was a very risky affair. Film cameras did not often make intrusions into everyday life in Socialist Yugoslavia, and therefore the apparatus itself is the carrier of subversive potential, upsetting the status quo and transforming it into unique visible evidence. Gotovac’s film is compared with The Searchers (2016, 2 min., video, courtesy of the artist), a video by Kevin L. Ferguson that uses frame grabs summed in sequence to subvert and transform the visual style of John Ford’s canonical Western. Gotovac’s film features the usage of a readymade soundtrack lifted from the classical television series Bonanza. Sharing this Western background, Blue Rider and Ferguson’s The Searchers exemplify very differently what subversion may well mean: while the former tackles this topic by focusing on the combination of film and life, emphasising the everyday and spontaneity as counter-elements mitigating the pretentions of a scenario, the latter reshapes Ford’s film, offering a visual reinterpretation of filmic time and image which relies instead upon a sophisticated technical process based on a composition of frame grabs taken every 10 seconds. Ferguson’s work looks like a true visual tapestry whose threads are multilayered images thickening the digital grain of the film’s perceptive materiality.

Black Film (1971, 14 min., 16mm transferred to video, courtesy of the artist) by Želimir Žilnik takes an interventionist, socially-engaged stance toward subversion. The artist appears in this film on the street, investigating the homeless situation in Novi Sad, Serbia, eventually bringing a number of vagrants to his apartment so they can sleep for the night and figure out a solution to their condition. Of course, there is no solution. The ultimate message is not dissimilar to Makavejev’s subversive polemics: don’t believe in socio-critical film. Žilnik’s self-critical realism is a subversive act par excellence for artists who display a fervent, idealistic humanism in their work. The link here is with the film Batrachian’s Ballad (2016, 11 min., 16mm transferred to video, courtesy of Portugal Film) by Leonor Teles, which won the Golden Bear for Short Film at the Berlinale. Teles’ work is an anti-racist intervention into the status quo of Portuguese society – into the very places of business that structure Portuguese society. Her action consists of filming herself rushing into stores, stealing the green porcelain frogs that shopkeepers display to symbolize a warding off of the presence of Roma people, and smashing them on the concrete. This is literally a destructive cinema, an unruly and anarchic cinema, moving the act of subversion into ethically-questionable territory – which it should never be afraid to do, if we are to believe in subversion.

This exhibition also presents a literary section comprising the following key publications that chart the various contours of cinematic subversion: Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art (French edition, 1977); the large-format anthology Film and Revolution Today, edited by Dušan Makavejev and Lazar Stojanović in connection with the curated film program Confrontation (Belgrade FEST, 1971); Želimir Žilnik’s manifestos ‘Black Film’ and ‘This Festival is a Graveyard’ (Belgrade Short and Documentary Film Festival/Sineast #13-14, 1971); Richard Porton’s Film and the Anarchist Imagination (1999); the catalog for Sergio Grmek Germani’s curated film program Socialism (Subversive Film Festival Zagreb, 2010); the online journal Now! A Journal of Urgent Praxis, which exemplifies the subversive elements of open access publication projects.

When interviewed by Scott MacDonald, Amos Vogel claimed that the ‘common denominator’ of the films he selected for his Cinema 16 screening space is that ‘they created a disturbance in the status quo […] they would disturb you in some way, would add to your knowledge and make you change’.[1] Inspired by the research that Vogel developed over many years of curating, the works in this exhibition represent that radical spirit. They offer new ways of seeing, unpredictable practices, unexpected actions, and alternative appraisals of the moving image and the discourses that surround it.

Miriam de Rosa & Greg de Cuir Jr

December 2017

The curators would like to acknowledge the support of Alex Johnston, NOW! A Journal of Urgent Praxis, Richard Porton, Miki Stojanović, Wanda Strauven, Verso, the Yugoslav Kinoteka Library, and all of the writers and artists.

Miriam de Rosa is Senior Lecturer in Media & Communications at Coventry University. She most recently organized the screening program Desktop Cinema at Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb.

Greg de Cuir Jr is Selector at Alternative Film/Video. He most recently organized the screening program Avant-Noir, Volume 3 at ICA London.

[1] Amos Vogel in conversation with Scott MacDonald, in Cinema 16: Documents toward a history of the film society, by Scott MacDonald. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002: pp. 44, 51.

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