Grrrboooaaaaggghhhh! The Big Chill website is down. We’ve been waiting for it to be back up so we can buy our tickets for about a week. We’ve given up. I’m calling their phone booking line tomorrow morning. Whoop-de-whoop for days off.
Anybody know any more than me about this badness? I hope it doesn’t mean the website collapsed under the weight of demand for tickets, although I doubt that would be the case. It’s not as if it’s as manic as Glastonbury.
Considering the glut of qualified graduates queuing up for a job in the media, is it any wonder people are getting used? Reading this makes me think that my less conventional approach to breaking into the film and TV industry may actually be the better bet.
‘Exploitation is more widespread than ever’ Media Guardian, 11th April, 2005
For those of you who are unsure exactly what my method is, here’s the lowdown:
That’s my method so far. Due to lack of data, I cannot promise it will deliver the desired results, but I feel my big break is just around the corner. It’s a lot more fun than working eighty hours a week for a pittance in London, and I appear to have come just as far by doing so. Here’s to being a Deadbeattm!
Davis Film Festival tonight and tomorrow. Lots of shorts, lots of schmoozing. And, thanks to one of my regular caffeine-addicts, I have a free ticket. Get in!
Yes folks, grief porn is the best definition I’ve heard this week.
I’m well aware that the story has been swishing around the internet for a couple of weeks, which makes it positively prehistoric in terms of modern-day newsworthiness, but the homosexual necrophiliac ducks are still calling to me to post about them. Here’s the story in the Guardian, and here’s the oddly prescient Alan Moore song, the March of the Sinister Ducks (3.1meg mp3 file).
Once again, Alan Moore knows the score.
Junkopia kudos to the first person to identify the movie this still is from.
Kelvin and James are not allowed to enter; they can send me smug emails instead.
I don’t normally get pant-wettingly excited about movies coming out. Normally the ones I enjoy most are the ones I discover almost by accident. Recently Shaun of the Dead, Hero and Sideways were movies I went to see because I’d heard a little about them and had an inkling they might be my kind of thing. I was keen to see them, but they weren’t exactly highlighted on my calendar months in advance. I can’t tell you release dates for films any more than I can remember anniversaries.
I’ve listened to the radio series; I’ve read all four installments of the book; I can quote the odd line here and there; I regret never tracking down the TV series. The movie is out on April 29th and I’m considering going to the cinema the night it opens. I might even book tickets ahead of time because I almost wet myself earlier today when I saw the trailer.
I understand that some people are getting weak-kneed about some other science fiction/fantasy film. It seems as if they’re in denial of the fact that the two prequels of this movie left them feeling dirty and cheated. This other movie excites me not a jot.
If Tony Blair can apologise for the Potato Famine, then I can certainly be offended on behalf of the Irish when America turns them into Dr. Seuss characters.
Reports were coming into the coffee shop this morning that a bar in town, the Graduate, was serving a green eggs and ham breakfast in honour of St. Patrick’s Day.
Green eggs and ham?
Yeah, it’s Irish.
Great! I’ll take three!
Normally I am a big fan of the writing in the New Yorker. It’s elegant, sometimes witty and often precise and descriptive. Even the piece on the British foxhunting debate, which portrayed Britain in a modern version of the old sweeping stereotypes, was just about within my tolerance. I just read it as a fun story rather than a serious piece about the real world. And let’s face it, for many, many Americans – even the educated liberal middle-classes who form the New Yorker’s core audience, Europe is just a fun story, a place to go on holiday. So, despite the occasional wrongheaded opinion piece and the articles about other cultures which fail to pick up on the cultural nuances, I’m always glad to see the latest issue sitting in the mail box. It’s a good read and I can accept the bad apple in the barrel.
Daniel Zalewski’s article about Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, head of the OMA agency, which appeared in the March 14th issue, is more than a bad apple. It’s so rotten it deserves to be reproduced in Private Eye’s Pseud’s Corner.
Hunter S. Thompson shot himself to death last night. Was it suicide? Was it a joke? Was it the drugs? Was it an accident? Who knows?
But looking at this picture it’s hard to be surprised by the method of self-erasure he chose.
I’ve been kind-of a fan for years, ever since I saw them in support of Radiohead in Oxford, but recently I’ve been getting more into Sigur Rós. Yes, yes, I know I’ve come to them fairly late, but I’ve not been buying quite as many CDs for the last couple of years and it’s not as if they get any airplay on US radio.
No, the reason I’m getting into them quite so much besides Jonsi’s voice, the bowed guitar, the lush arrangements and haunting melodies, is because they have a very sensible website. Rather against the norm, it’s extremely informative, doesn’t stream music at you unbidden and, best of all, offers a plethora of free high-quality mp3s for you to download. It’s enough to pique my interest, and it’s in keeping with the band’s ethos that they treat their fans as real human beings rather than cashcows.
I bought ágætis byrjun and thanks to the website I know how to pronounce it too. I expect I’ll be getting hold of () next. Being able to get hold of tunes for free has – shock – made me more likely to buy the band’s music. Big record companies are so not rock’n’roll. If they were they’d know the best business model is the heroin dealer’s: the first couple of fixes are free – after that you pay.
While I’m on the subject of music downloading, the restrictions programmed into files bought from iTunes, Napster, etc. make buying from them a real rip-off. Thankfully there are some sites that sell downloadable music without the DRM. One of them is run by Warp records and through it you can buy music from a cool (if small) selection of labels – including Ninja Tune. Oh yes. It’s called Bleep.
It’s not as good as having a CD with liner notes, but it is cheaper.
Finally, what could be more intriguing than a stone marimba made by a man in a hobbit hole? The story of a man who makes stone marimbas in hobbit holes badly translated from German, perhaps?
Picture this:
Sexy all-American girl (white skin, blonde hair, wide mouth) sitting astride a supersized bucking bronco machine, holding supersized burger. A bluesy rawk riff chugs and stomps in the background. The bronco bucks in gelatinous slo-mo. The girl sways atop, one hand in the air, the other still wrapped around the burger. Burger gets bitten, swallowed. Creamy oesophagus. Close-up of denim clad rump. Finally the girl, looking sultry to camera, pokes tongue from between glistening lips to lick grease from her fingers. Fade to black. Caption: "Eat right. Exercise more."
I wish I’d made up this cretinous conflation of bad food, bad music, patriotic schmaltz and cheap sexpolitation, but it was just on the telly. Another reason I don’t like the Superbowl, besides the fact that the sport itself is MONUMENTALLY boring. And of course, it’s being shown on "Faahx" this year so the opening ceremony was full of war veterans and a choir of wholesome young things in uniform. No boobs this year. No siree. We’re going to keep this thing wholesome.
Vertigo (1958) is a film about a man who attempts to turn the clock back in pursuit of an image of a woman he loves. The Madeline he loves is not the Madeline who is Elster’s wife. Nor is she Judy, the woman who has been paid by Elster to act as his wife. The Madeline Scotty has fallen in love with is a fiction.
When he thinks she is dead he breaks down. When he recovers he sees Judy on the street. As he attempts to make her back into Madeline he is attempting to return to an impossible past. At the moment his vision is fully realised it is snatched away from him. Judy plummets to her death just as Madeline did before her.
Now, compare to La Jetée (1962). The protagonist of La Jetée lives in a post-apocalyptic Paris. He is sent into the past by evil experimenters. He is a better candidate for time travel than others because his memory is strongly marked by an image of his past, the image of a woman. He travels backwards in time and finds this woman. He makes several more trips back in time, and each time he meets her. They become friends, they fall in love.
Finally the experimenters are satisfied he can cope with being sent to whichever point in time they choose. He is sent into the future to bring back a power plant which will save the human race. Once he has fulfilled this task he is returned to his prison cell. The virtuous people of the future come to him in his cell and offer to accept him as one of their own. He declines. He doesn’t want to live in the future. He wants to return to the past and the woman he loves. They oblige. He is returned to the moment he remembers so vividly. He has achieved his return to an impossible past, and at the moment of its consummation it is snatched away from him, just like it is taken from Scotty.
Aside from these parallels in the storyline there are visual clues. The hairstyle of the woman in La Jetée is sometimes the same as Madeline’s in Vertigo, but most importantly, there is a brief scene in La Jetée where the man points to a point beyond a sequioa tree stump to show the woman where in time he comes from. The shot of their hands is very similar to Judy/Madeline’s in Vertigo.
Marker drops clues in Sans Soleil and on his CD-ROM Immemory. From the script of Sans Soleil:
The small Victorian hotel where Madeline disappeared had disappeared itself; concrete had replaced it, at the corner of Eddy and Gough. On the other hand the sequoia cut was still in Muir Woods. On it Madeline traced the short distance between two of those concentric lines that measured the age of the tree and said, “Here I was born… and here I died.â€
He remembered another film in which this passage was quoted. The sequoia was the one in the Jardin des plantes in Paris, and the hand pointed to a place outside the tree, outside of time.
And now, writing about how San Francisco has changed since Vertigo was made in Immemory:
The Redwood round is still at the entry to Muir Woods on the other side of the bay, it has had more luck than its sister at the Jardin des Plantes, now relegated to a basement. (Vertigo could almost be shot in the same decors today, unlike its remake in Paris).
Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys is a remake of La Jetée, but that doesn’t mean it’s a re-remake of Vertigo. What Marker took from Hitchcock was the central relationship between the man and the woman and its exploration of the workings of memory and desire. What Gilliam took from Marker was the idea of sending people backwards and forwards in time to save the present. In fact, Gilliam didn’t develop the idea for Twelve Monkeys and he came to direct the film having never seen La Jetée. He watched it later. The screenwriters of Twelve Monkeys, it seems to me, missed the core of La Jetée – or maybe what they wanted to take from the film and make anew simply wasn’t what I think is vitally important about it.
Today, thanks to Courtney’s Mum’s Christmas generosity, I was reunited with one of my favourite films, Chris. Marker’s Sans Soleil. After five viewings and a very bad undergraduate thesis on time, memory and film, I still haven’t puzzled my way through all its layers of meaning, but it’s ever present in my mental film archive. I find myself trying to see places and events through Marker’s lens, to reach his level of understanding. Perhaps by doing so I will solve not just the mysteries of time, but also the movie.
Accompanying Sans Soleil on the DVD is another of Marker’s films, also one of my favourites, La Jetée. In Marker’s words, it is a remake of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (another of my favourites), and it is the movie which was remade as Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys. It is a film about time travel told (almost) entirely in still images. In the liner notes for the DVD, Marker writes that
…it’s rather in order to bring some comfort to young filmmakers in need that I mention these few technical details: the material for La Jetée has been created with a Pentax 24 x 36, and the only "cinema" part (the blinking of the eyes) with an Arriflex 35mm camera, borrowed for one hour. Sans Soleil was entirely shot with a 16mm Beaulieu silent film camera (not one synch take within the whole film) with 100ft reels – 2’44 autonomy! – and a small cassette recorder – not even a Walkman, they didn’t exist yet … No silly boasting here, just the conviction that today, with the advent of computer and small DV camera (unintentional homage to Dziga Vertov), would-be directors need no longer to submit their fate to the unpredictability of producers, or the arthritis of televisions, and that by following their whims or passions, they will perhaps see one day their tinkering elevated to DVD-status by honorable men.
Chris. Marker is one of my heroes.
I have just discovered a site, markertext.com which did not exist last time I looked, which offers a transcription of the narration of Sans Soleil complete with links explaining some of the references. I expect to spend quite some time poring over it. What a fantastic use of the educational possibilities of the internet!
"My personal problem is more specific: how to film the ladies of Bissau? Apparently, the magical function of the eye was working against me there. It was in the marketplaces of Bissau and Cape Verde that I could stare at them again with equality: I see her, she saw me, she knows that I see her, she drops me her glance, but just at an angle where it is still possible to act as though it was not addressed to me, and at the end the real glance, straightforward, that lasted a twenty-fourth of a second, the length of a film frame."
Once I have finished my Vertigo pilgrimage around San Francisco, I have a new destination. In the district of Shinjuku, Tokyo, there is a bar dedicated to La Jetée. When famous filmmakers drop in they draw a picture of a cat on their whisky bottle. Coppola, Scorsese, Wenders and Jarmusch have all paid homage.
Courtney’s been marking end-of-term Shakespeare exams. She has one student who consistently takes very difficult buzzword theories which s/he doesn’t understand and tries to cram them into essays where they don’t belong. So far the student has tried to use Foucault to argue that King Lear is trapped in a Panopticon, and has invoked Edward Said’s theories on Orientalism to suggest that Caliban, the savage otherworldly son of the witch Sycorax apparently represents arabic culture. A recurring feature in the student’s essays is Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacrum.
I like simulacra. Here’s a literal simulacrum: it’s a little image of Rasputin in a kitten’s ear, see:
Image "borrowed" from Fortean Times’ Simulacra Corner.
A very cute juxtaposition of the innocent and the debased, I think you’ll agree. Another simulacra is the grilled cheese sandwich that was all over the net about a month ago, and eventually sold on ebay for $28,000. Quite how these instances of illusory resemblance tie into the relationship between Antony and Cleopatra is still a mystery to me. It’s probably still a mystery to Courtney’s student too.
Next time I find myself in Edinburgh I’m going to check out the Pornaoke Lounge! Ooooh yeeeesss!
