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Archive for the 'Documentary film' Category
Unveiling Ebertfest 2014
Kristin here:
In the early days of Ebertfest, Roger personally introduced every film at this five-day event, which took place this year from April 23 to 27. He would be onstage for the discussions and question sessions after each screening, often joined by directors, actors, or friends in the industry.
In the summer of 2006, there began the long battle with cancer that Roger fought so determinedly. He withdrew gradually from full participation in the festival that he had founded in his hometown of Champaign-Urbana sixteen years ago. He struggled to immerse himself in the festival, even though repeated surgeries had robbed him of his voice. He introduced fewer films, doing so with his computer's artificial voice, and when even that became too taxing, he sat in his lounge chair at the back of the Virginia Theater, enjoying the event and occasionally appearing onstage with a cheery thumbs-up. Finally, last year on April 4, less than three weeks before the fifteenth Ebertfest, he passed away. That year's festival became a celebration of his life.
The celebration continued this year, though on a more upbeat note. Some films were chosen from a list that Roger had left to his wife Chaz and festival organizer Nate Kohn, and they selected others in the same indie spirit. The tradition of showing a silent film with musical accompaniment was maintained. As always, the festival passes sold out, and the crowd, including many long-time regulars, enthusiastically cheered both films and filmmakers.
The tributes
Roger did not live to see the documentary devoted to his life and based on his popular memoir of the same name, Life Itself. It premiered in January at this year's Sundance Film Festival. He participated in its making, however, encouraging director Steve James (whose 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams Roger had championed) to film him during the final four months of his life. Some of this candid footage reveals the painful and exhausting treatments Roger underwent, but much of it stresses his resilience and the support of Chaz and the rest of his family.
Life Itself was the opening night film. James has done a wonderful job of capturing the spirit of the book and in assembling archival footage and photographs, interspersed with new interviews. The result is anything but maudlin, with a candid treatment of Roger's early struggles with alcoholism and an amusing summary of Roger's prickly but affectionate relationship with his TV partner Gene Siskel.
Life Itself was picked up for theatrical distribution by Magnolia Pictures and will receive a summer release, followed by a showing on CNN. (Scott Foundas reviewed the film favorably for Variety, as did Todd McCarthy for The Hollywood Reporter.)
Another tribute followed the next day, when a life-size bronze statue of Roger by sculptor Rick Harney was unveiled outside the Virginia Theater (above). Harney portrays Roger in his most famous pose, sitting in a movie-theater seat and giving a thumbs-up gesture. There is an empty seat on either side of him, so that people can sit beside the statue and have their photos taken. (See the image of Barry C. Allen in the section "Of Paramount importance," below.)
Far from silent
Roger was a big fan of the Alloy Orchestra, consisting of (L to R above) Terry Donahue, Ken Winokur, and Roger Miller, who specialize in accompanying silent films. They have appeared several times at Ebertfest, playing original music for such films as Metropolis and Underworld. Rather than taking a traditional approach to silent-film music, using piano, organ, or small chamber ensemble, they compose modern scores, played on electronic keyboard combined with their well-known "rack of junk" percussion section, including a variety of found objects, supplemented with musical saw, banjo, accordion, clarinet, and other instruments. The result is surprisingly unified and provides a rousingly appropriate accompaniment to the silents shown at Ebertfest over the years.
I have had the privilege of introducing the film and leading the post-film Q&A on some of these occasions, including for this year's feature, Victor Seastrom's 1924 classic, He Who Gets Slapped. (Swedish director Victor Sjöström used the Americanized version during his career in Hollywood.) I put the film in context by pointing out three important historical aspects of the film. First, it was the first film made from script to screen by the newly formed MGM studio, formed in 1924 from the merger of Goldwyn Productions, Metro, and Louis B. Mayer Pictures. (Two earlier releases by MGM were Norma Shearer vehicles which originated at Mayer.) Second, it was probably the film that cemented Lon Chaney's stardom, after his breakthrough role as Quasimodo in the 1922 Hunchback of Notre Dame. Starting in 1912, Chaney had been in well over 100 films before Hunchback, many of them shorts and nearly all of them supporting roles. Third, He Who Gets Slapped was Seastrom's second American film after Name the Man in 1923, and a distinct improvement on that first effort.
Naturally MGM wanted a big, prestigious hit for its first production, and He Who Gets Slapped came through, being both a critical and popular success–and also boosted Norma Shearer to major stardom. Seastrom and Chaney both stayed on at MGM, though the former returned to European filmmaking after the coming of sound and Chaney died in 1930.
I was joined for the post-film discussion by Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune, and we talked with Donahue and Winokur while Miller sold the group's CDs and DVDs in the festival shop. They revealed that this new score had been commissioned by the Telluride Film Festival and that it was a project that appealed to their taste for off-beat films. There were many questions from the audience, and we suspect that the Alloy Orchestra will continue to be a regular feature of the festival.
A cornerstone of indie cinema
Although Roger was occasionally criticized for supposedly lowering the tone of film reviewing by participating in a television series, he and partner Gene Siskel regularly tried to promote indie and foreign films that didn't get wide attention. Roger did the same in his written reviews, and Ebertfest was originally known as the "Overlooked Film Festival." Inevitably it was shortened by many attendees to "Ebertfest," and eventually that name became official. It reflects the wider range of films that came to be included, with the silent-film screening and frequent showings of 70mm prints of films like My Fair Lady that were hardly overlooked.
Among Roger's friends was Michael Barker, co-founder and co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, one of the most important of the small number of American companies still specializing in independent and foreign releases. A long-time Ebertfest regular, Barker usually brings a current or recent release to show, along with filmmakers or actors. This year he was doubly generous, bringing Capote (2005, above), to which Roger had given a four-star review, and the current release Wadjda (2012).
Roger never reviewed the latter, but it is certainly the sort of film that he loved: a glimpse into a little-known culture by a first-time filmmaker with a progressive viewpoint. Wadjda is remarkable as the first feature film made in Saudi Arabia, where there are no movie theaters. Moreover, it was made by a woman, Haifaa Al-Monsour, and tells the story of a little girl who defies tradition by aspiring to buy and ride a bicycle in a country where this, like women driving cars, was illegal. (Below, Wadjda learns to ride a bicycle on a rooftop, hidden from public view.)
Both the film and Al-Monsour thoroughly charmed the audience. Barker interviewed her afterward, and she revealed that, not surprisingly, the making of the film was touched by the same sort of repression that it portrays. Women are not allowed to work alongside men in Saudi Arabia, so Al-Monsour had to hide in a van while shooting on location. Given that there is no cinema infrastructure in the country, the film was a Saudi Arabian-German co-production, with Arabic and German names mingling in the credits. We also learned that it has since become legal for Saudi girls to ride bicycles. Perhaps someday filmmaking will become more common there, and male and female crew members can work openly together.
Naturally Wadjda was made with a digital camera, since this new technology is crucial to the spread of filmmaking in places like the Middle East where there is little money or equipment for production. In contrast, Capote was shown in a beautiful widescreen 35mm print that looked great spread across the entire width of the Virginia's huge screen. Naturally the screening became a tribute to the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman, giving his only Oscar-winning performance (out of four nominations) in the lead role.
Barker had brought with him a surprise guest, Capote's director, Bennett Miller, whose appearance had not been announced in advance. He discussed how he and scriptwriter Dan Futterman learned that there was a second, rival Capote film in the works, Infamous (2006), which also dealt with the period when the author was researching In Cold Blood. Miller and Futterman decided to press ahead, a wise move in that their film drew more attention than did Infamous. Much of the discussion was devoted to Hoffman's performance and his acting style in general.
Capote was Miller's first fiction feature. He had come to public attention with his documentary The Cruise (1998), which Roger had given a brief three-star review. Roger continued his support for Miller with a four-star review for Moneyball (2011). It's a pity he did not live to see Miller's latest, Foxcatcher, which will be playing in competition at Cannes in May.
Overlooked no longer
Perhaps no young filmmaker better demonstrates the impact that Roger's support can have on a career than Ramin Bahrani. Roger saw his first feature, Man Push Cart, at Sundance in 2006 and invited it and the filmmaker to the "Overlooked Film Festival" that April. (Roger's Sundance review is here.) The film then played other festivals, notably Venice and our own Madison-based Wisconsin Film Festival. It won several awards, including an Independent Spirit Award for best first feature. In October Roger gave the film a more formal review, awarding it four stars. Man Push Cart never got a wide release, and it certainly didn't make much money. Still, quite possibly the high profile provided by Roger's attention allowed Bahrani to move ahead with his career.
His second film, Chop Shop, brought him to Ebertfest a second time, in 2009. (Roger's program notes are here, and his four-star review here.) At about that time, Bahrani's third film, Goodbye Solo, was released. Given its modest budget, it did reasonably well at the box office, grossing nearly a million dollars worldwide (in contrast to Man Push Cart's roughly $56 thousand). Bahrani inched toward mainstream filmmaking with At Any Price (2012), starring Dennis Quaid and Zac Efron, and he is currently in post-production on 99 Homes, with Andrew Garfield, Michael Shannon, and Laura Dern. During the onstage discussion, he spoke of struggling to maintain a balance between the indie spirit of his earlier films and the more popularly oriented films he has recently made.
Bahrani visited Ebertfest for a third time this year, belatedly showing Goodbye Solo. We had enjoyed this film when it came out, and it holds up very well on a second viewing. It's a simple story of opposites coming together by chance. An irrepressibly talkative, friendly immigrant cab driver, Solo (a nickname for Souléymane), becomes concerned when a dour elderly man engages him for a one-way trip to a regional park whose main feature is a windy cliff. He fears that William is planning suicide. Solo arranges to drive William whenever he calls for a cab and even becomes his roommate in a cheap hotel. Gradually, with the help of his young stepdaughter Alex, he seems to draw William out of his defensive shell.
As in Bahrani's earlier films the main character is an immigrant and played by one, using his own first name (Souléymane Sy Savané). He's the main character in that we are with him almost constantly, seeing William only as he does. William is a vital counterpart to him, however. He is perfectly embodied by Red West, an actor who worked for Elvis Presley and did stunt work and bit parts in films and television since the late 1950s. He may look vaguely familiar to some viewers, but he's not really recognizable as a star and comes across convincingly as an aging man buffeted by life's misfortunes.
Most of the film takes place in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Bahrani's hometown, with many moody, atmospheric shots of the cityscape at night. One crucial scene involves a drive into the woods and mountains, however, and much of it is filmed in a dense fog. One questioner from the audience asked if Bahrani had planned to shoot in such weather or if, given his short shooting schedule, the fog turned out to be a hindrance to him. He responded that he had dreamed of being able to shoot in fog and that the weather cooperated on the three days planned for that locale. In fact, he re-shot some images as the fog became denser, to keep the scene fairly consistent.
Bahrani's presence at Ebertfest spans half its existence, from 2006 to 2014. As the festival becomes more diverse in its offerings, it is good to have him back as a reminder of the Ebertfest's early emphasis on the "overlooked."
Of Paramount importance
Logo for National Telefilm Associates, TV syndication arm of Republic Pictures.
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Among the guests at this year's E-fest was Barry C. Allen. For over a decade Barry was Executive Director of Film Preservation and Archival Resources for Paramount. That meant that he had to find, protect, and preserve the film and television assets of the company—including not just the Paramount-labeled product but libraries that Paramount acquired. Most notable among the latter was the Republic Pictures collection.
We may think of Republic as primarily a B studio, but it produced several significant films in the 1940s and 1950s—The Red Pony, The Great Flammarion, Macbeth, Moonrise, and Johnny Guitar. John Wayne became the most famous Republic star in films like Dark Command, Angel and the Badman, and Sands of Iwo Jima. John Ford's The Quiet Man was Wayne's last for the studio, which folded in 1959. Next time you see one of the gorgeous prints or digital copies of that classic, thank Barry for his deep background work that underlies the ongoing work of his dedicated colleagues.
Barry told me quite a lot about conservation and restoration, but just as fascinating was his account of his earlier career. A lover of opera, literature, and painting since his teenage years, he was as well a passionate movie lover. An Indianapolis native, he thinks he saw his first movie in 1949 at the Vogue, now a nightclub. He projected films in his high school and explored still photography. He was impressed when a teacher told him: "If you want to make film, learn editing." Soon he was in a local TV station editing syndicated movies.
Hard as it may seem for young people today to believe, in the 1950s TV stations routinely cut the films they showed. Packages of 16mm prints circulated to local stations, and these showings were sponsored by local businesses. Commercials had to be inserted (usually eight per show), and the films had to be fitted to specific lengths.
WISH-TV ran three movies a day, and two of those would be trimmed to 90-minute air slots. That meant reducing the film, regardless of length, to 67-68 minutes. Barry's job was to look for scenes to omit—usually the opening portions—and smoothly remove them. Fortunately for purists, the late movie, running at 11:30, was usually shown uncut, and then the station would sign off.
By coincidence I recently saw a TV print of Union Depot (Warners, 1932) that had several minutes of the opening exposition lopped off. We who have Turner Classic Movies don't realize how lucky we are. Fortunately for film collectors, some stations, like Barry's, retained the trims and put them back into the prints.
While working at WISH-TV, Barry began booking films part-time. He programmed some art cinemas in the Indianapolis area during the early 1970s, mixing classic fare (Marx Brothers), current cult movies (Night of the Living Dead), and arthouse releases like Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie—a bigger hit than anyone had anticipated. He also helped arrange a visit of Gloria Swanson with Queen Kelly; she carried the nitrate reels in her baggage.
At the same time, Barry was learning the new world of video editing, with ¾" tape and telecine. Because of his experience in television, Barry was contacted by Paramount to become Director of Domestic Syndication Operations. His chief duty was to deliver films to TV stations via tape, satellite, and prints. From that position, he moved to the preservation role he held until 2010, when he retired.
Barry is a true film fan. He has reread Brownlow's The Parade's Gone By many times and retains his love for classic cinema. The film that converted him to foreign-language cinema was, as for many of his generation, Children of Paradise, but he retains a fondness for Juliet of the Spirits, The Lady Killers, and other mainstays of the arthouse circuit of his (and my) day. He's proudest of his work preserving John Wayne's pre-Stagecoach films.
It was a great pleasure to hang out with Barry at Ebertfest. Talking with him reminded me that The Industry has long housed many sophisticated intellectuals and cinephiles. Not every suit is a crass bureaucrat.
Young-ish adult
Patton Oswalt had planned to come to Ebertfest in an earlier year, to accompany Big Fan and to show Kind Hearts and Coronets to an undergrad audience. He had to withdraw, but he showed up this year. On Wednesday night he screened The Taking of Pelham 123 to an enthusiastic campus crowd, and the following night, after getting his Golden Thumb, he talked about Young Adult. (Roger's review is here.)
As you might expect from someone who has mastered stand-up, writing (the excellent Zombie Spaceship Wasteland), TV acting, and film acting, Oswalt stressed the need for young people to grab every opportunity to work. He enjoys doing stand-up; with no need to adjust to anybody else, it's "the last fascist post in entertainment." But he also likes working with other actors in the collaborative milieu of shooting film. He insists on not improvising: "Do all the work before you get on camera." I was surprised at how quickly Young Adult was shot—one month, no sets. Oswalt explained that one aspect of his character in the film, a guy who customizes peculiar action figures, was based on Sillof, a hobbyist who does the same thing and sells the results. Oswalt talks about Sillof and Roger Ebert here.
It's common for viewers to notice that Mavis Gary, the malevolent, disturbed main character of Young Adult, doesn't change or learn. "Anti-arc and anti-growth," Oswalt called the movie. I found the film intriguing because structurally, it seems to be that rare romantic comedy centered on the antagonist.
Mavis returns to her home town to seduce her old boyfriend, who's now a happy husband and father. A more conventional plot would be organized around Buddy and his family. In that version we'd share their perspective on the action and we'd see Mavis as a disruptive force menacing their happiness.
What screenwriter Diablo Cody has done, I think, is built the film around what most plots would consider the villain. So it's not surprising that there's no change; villains often persist in their wickedness to the point of death. Attaching our viewpoint to the traditional antagonist not only creates new comic possibilities, mostly based on Mavis's growing desperation and her obliviousness to her social gaffes. The movie comes off as more sour and outrageous than it would if Buddy and Beth had been the center of the plot.
Making us side with the villain also allows Oswalt, as Matt Freehauf, to play a more active role as Mavis's counselor. In a more traditional film, he'd probably be rewritten to be a friend of Buddy's. Here he's the wisecracking voice of sanity, reminding Mavis of her selfishness while still being enough in thrall to high-school values to find her fascinating. As in Shakespearean comedy, though, the spoiler is expelled from the green world that she threatens. It's just that here, we go in and out of it with her and see that her illusions remain intact. Maybe we also share her sense that the good people can be fairly boring.
All you can eat
There aren't any villains in Ann Hui's A Simple Life, a film we first saw in Vancouver back in 2011. Roger had hoped to bring it last year, but Ann couldn't come, as she was working on her upcoming release, The Golden Era. This year she was free to accompany the film that had a special meaning for Roger at that point in his life.
The quietness of the film is exemplary. It's an effort to make a drama out of everyday happenings—people working, eating, sharing a home, getting sick, worrying about money, helping friends, and all the other stuff that fills most of our time. The two central characters are, as Roger's review puts it, "two inward people" who are simple and decent. Yet Ann's script and direction, and the playing of Deanie Yip Tak-han and Andy Lau Tak-wah, give us a full-length portrait of a relationship in which each depends on the other.
Roger Leung takes Ah-Tao, his amah, or all-purpose servant, pretty much for granted. She feeds him, watches out for his health, cleans the apartment, even packs for his business trips. When he's not loping to and from his film shoot, he's impassively chowing down her cooking and staring at the TV. A sudden stroke incapacitates her, and now comes the first surprise. A conventional plot would show her resisting being sent to a nursing home, but she insists on going. Having worked for Roger's family for sixty years, Ah-Tao can't accept being waited upon in the apartment. So she moves to a home, where most of the film takes place.
A Simple Life resists the chance to play up dramas in the facility. Thanks to a mixture of amateur actors and non-actors, the film has a documentary quality. It captures in a matter-of-fact way the grim side of the place—slack jaws, staring eyes, pervasive smells. (A small touch: Ah-Tao stuffs tissue into her nostrils when she heads to the toilet.) Mostly, however, we get a sense of the facility's everyday routines as the seasons change. The dramas are minuscule. Occasionally the old folks snap at one another, and one visitor gets testy with her mother-in-law. One woman dies (in a bit of cinematic trickery, Ann suggests that it's Ah-Tao), and an old man who keeps borrowing money is revealed to have a bit of a secret. It's suggested that a pleasant young woman working at the care facility will become Roger's new amah, but that seems not to happen. The prospect of a romance with her is evoked only to be dispelled.
Ah-Tao's health crisis has made Roger more self-reliant, but his life has become much emptier. He seems to realize this in a late scene, when he stands in the hospital deciding how to handle Ah-Tao's final illness. Throughout the film, food has been a multifaceted image of caring, community, friendship, childhood (Roger's friends recall Ah-Tao cooking for them), and even the afterlife. Ah-Tao and Roger rewrite the Ecclesiastes line about what's proper to every season by filling in favorite dishes. As he mulls over Ah-Tao's fate, Roger is, of course, eating. But it's cheap takeaway noodles and soda pop. This silent scene measures his, and her, loss better than any dialogue could.
The art of American agitprop
Matt Zoller Seitz and Oliver Stone on stage at the Virginia Theatre.
A Simple Life is a very quiet film. Ebertfest's highest-profile visitors brought along two of the noisiest movies of 1989. It's the twenty-fifth anniversary of Do The Right Thing (Roger's review) and Born on the Fourth of July (Roger's review), and seen in successive nights they seemed to me to put the "agitation" into agitprop.
During the Q & A, Spike Lee reminded us that some initial reviews of the film (here shown in a gorgeous 35mm print) had warned that the film could arouse racial tensions. Odie Henderson has charted the alarmist tone of many critiques. Lee insisted, as he has for years, that he was asking questions rather than positing solutions. "We wanted the audience to determine who did the right thing." He added that the film was, at least, true to the tensions of New York at the time, which were–and still are–unresolved.
The ending has become the most controversial part of the film. It's here that Lee was, I think, especially forceful. The crowd in the street is aghast at the killing of Radio Raheem by a ferocious cop, but what really triggers the riot is Mookie's act of smashing the pizzeria window. I've always taken this as Mookie finally choosing sides. He has sat the fence throughout–befriending one of Sal's sons and quarreling with the other, supporting Sal in some moments but ragging him in others. Now he focuses the issue: Are property rights (Sal's sovereignty over his business) more important than human life? Moreover, in a crisis, Mookie must ally himself with the people he lives with, not the Italian-Americans who drive in every day. It's a courageous scene because it risks making viewers, especially white viewers, turn against that charming character, but I can't imagine the action concluding any other way. Lee had to move the project to Universal from Paramount, where the suits wanted Mookie and Sal to hug at the end.
Staking so much on social allegory, the film sacrifices characterization. Characters tend to stand for social roles and attitudes rather than stand on their own as individuals. The actors' performances, especially their line readings, keep the roles fresh, though, and the film still looks magnificent. I was struck this time by the extravagance of its visual style. In almost every scene Lee tweaks things pictorially through angles, color saturation, slow-motion, short and long lenses, and the like–extravagant noodlings that may be the filmic equivalent of street graffiti.
By the end, in order to underscore the confrontation of Radio Raheem and Sal, Lee and DP Ernest Dickerson go all out with clashing, steeply canted wide-angle shots. (We've seen a few before, but not so many together and usually not so close.) Having dialed things up pretty far, the movie has to go to 10.
In Born on the Fourth of July, Stone more or less starts at 11 and dials up from there. Beginning with boys playing soldier and shifting to an Independence Day parade that for scale and pomp would do justice to V-J Day, the movie announces itself as larger than life. The storyline is pretty straightforward, much simpler than that of Do The Right Thing. A keen young patriot fired up with JFK's anti-Communist fervor plunges into the savage inferno of Viet Nam. Coming back haunted and paralyzed, Ron Kovic is still a fervent America-firster until he sees college kids pounded by cops during a demonstration. This sets him thinking, and eventually, after finding no solace in the fleshpots of Mexico, he returns to join the anti-war movement.
Even more than Lee, Stone sacrifices characterization and plot density to a larger message. The Kovic character arc suits Cruise, who built his early career on playing overconfident striplings who get whacked by reality. But again characterization is played down in favor of symbolic typicality. While there's a suggestion that Ron Kovic joins the Marines partly to prove his manhood after losing a crucial wrestling match, the plot also insists that his hectoring mother and community pressure force him to live up to the model of patriotic young America. He becomes an emblem of every young man who went to prove his loyalty to Mom and apple pie.
Likewise, Ron's almost-girlfriend in high school becomes a college activist and so their reunion–and her indifference to his concern for her–is subsumed to a larger political point. (The hippies forget the vets.) We learn almost nothing about the friend who also goes into service; when they reunite back home, their exchanges consist mostly of more reflections on the awfulness of the war. Later Cruise is betrayed, almost casually, by an activist who turns out to be a narc. But this man is scarcely identified, let alone given motives: he's there to remind us that the cops planted moles among the movement.
What fills in for characterization is spectacle. I don't mean vast action; Stone explained that he had quite a limited budget, and crowds were at a premium. Instead, what's showcased, as in Do The Right Thing, is a dazzling cinematic technique.
Visiting the UW-Madison campus just before coming to Urbana for Ebertfest, Stone offered some filmmaking advice: "Tell it fast, tell it excitingly." The excitement here comes from slamming whip pans, thunderous sound, various degrees of slow-motion, silhouettes, jerky cuts, Steadicam trailing, handheld shots, all jammed into the wide, wide frame. Every crack is filled with icons and noises–flags, whirring choppers, kids with toy guns, prancing blondes, commentative music. "Soldier Boy" plays on the supermarket Muzak when Ron is telling Donna about his plans.
By the time Ron visits the family of the comrade he accidentally killed, Stone finds another method of visual italicization: the split-focus diopter that creates slightly surreal depth.
Since so many scenes have consisted of a flurry of intensified techniques, simple over-the-shoulder reverse shots might let the excitement level drop. So a new optical device aims to deliver fresh impact in one of the film's quietest moments.
Like Lee, Stone took the Virginia Theatre audience behind the scenes. He agreed with William Friedkin, who was originally slated to do the film: "This is as close as you'll every come to Frank Capra." Instead of using the shuffled time scheme of Kovic's autobiography, Friedkin advised that "This is good corn. Write it straight through." Hence the film breaks into distinct chapters, each about half an hour long and sometimes tagged with dates. They operate as blocks measuring phases of Ron's conversion. Like many filmmakers of his period, Stone deliberately made each chapter pictorially distinct–the low-contrast Life-magazine colors of the opening parade versus the lava-like orange of the beachfront battle.
Stone pointed out that this film marked the beginning of his career as a figure of public controversy. Like Lee, he was attacked from many sides, and from then on he was a lightning rod. Matt Zoller Seitz (who's preparing a book on Stone) pointed out that at the period, he was astonishingly prolific. From 1986 (Salvador, Platoon) to 1999 (Any Given Sunday), he directed twelve features, about one a year.
Lee was hyperactive as well over the same years, releasing fourteen films. And neither has stopped. Lee's new film is the Kickstarter-funded Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, while Stone is touring to support the DVD release of his 2012 documentary series, The Untold History of the United States. Both men like to work, and more important, they're driven by their ideas as well as their feelings. By seeking new ways to agitate us, they impart an inflammatory energy to everything they try. And in giving them a chance to share their insights and intelligence with audiences outside the Cannes-Berlin-Venice circuit, Ebertfest once again demonstrates its uniqueness. Roger would be proud.
The introductions and Q&A sessions for most of the films, as well as the morning panel discussions, have been posted on Ebertfest's YouTube page. Program notes for each film are online; see this schedule and click on the title.
For historical background on Barry Allen's work as an editor of syndicated TV prints, see Eric Hoyt's new book Hollywood Vault: Film Libraries Before Home Video.
P. S. 1 May 2014: Thanks to Ramin S. Khanjani for pointing out that Ramin Bahrani had worked on other films before Man Push Cart. These included one feature he made in Iran, Biganegan (Strangers, 2000); it got only limited play in festivals and apparently a few theaters. I can't find information about the others online, and presumably they were shorts and/or did not receive distribution. (K.T.)
Ann Hui, with Kristin, gets into the spirit of Ebertfest. David is represented in absentia by the Dots.
I am a camera, sometimes: TIM'S VERMEER
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Sometimes you sense that a film is made especially for you, and you expect to enjoy and admire it well before you see it. This happened, I guess, with millions of people and films like Star Wars, Twilight, and The Hunger Games. I didn't share those viewers' hopes, but I knew from advance publicity that I would be keenly interested in the new documentary, Tim's Vermeer.
Why? It involves Penn & Teller, two demigods of mine; it's about art and technology; and it investigates the possibility that a painter used optical devices to create glowing, mysterious images. In the process, it reawakens the controversy around David Hockney's thesis in Secret Knowledge that many old masters were employing lenses and mirrors to render nature with unprecedented richness.
I wasn't disappointed. It was the most intellectual fun I've had at the movies in the last year.
It's hard to explain technical stuff clearly, and even harder to dramatize it so that audiences are engaged. Tim's Vermeer teaches you a lot about art, technology, and human will and skill. The personality of the central figure makes the tale engrossing and funny, often suspenseful, and at moments a little wistful. At the same time you get to study one of the greatest paintings in the western world in a thoroughly unpretentious way.
There, I've made my recommendation. Stop now if you want your experience completely unsullied. But you've perhaps read other reviews, and nearly everything I mention in what follows is mentioned in at least one of those. Sony Pictures Classics has kindly put the screenplay online, so there really are no secrets if you're determined to know it all. I want merely to convey some of the excitement the film gave me. It explores a fascinating problem in art history through one man's patience, ingenuity, and determination.
Tim Jenison, a wealthy software innovator, is a polymath—musician, tinkerer, and fan of art. He is not a painter, but he works with images constantly; part of his fortune derives from Video Toaster and other postproduction software. He comes across as articulate, avuncular, and gifted with a self-deprecating sense of humor.
In 2001 Tim learned of two recently published books, Hockney's Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters and Vermeer's Camera, a more academic investigation by Philip Steadman. Steadman made a strong case for Vermeer's use of a camera obscura in painting his pictures.
The camera obscura is a box that uses a small hole and lens to project an image of the scene outside the box. The image appears, inverted and flopped side to side, on the wall opposite the lens. Project the image onto a drawing surface, and you can trace it, although it's difficult and requires a lot of practice.
The photographic camera is such a device, using film stock or a chip to fix the image. Amateurs used portable camera obscuras for some centuries before photography, and there's evidence that Canaletto and other major artists employed them. A camera obscura (or "dark room") can be any size, and it's possible to set one up as a booth in a parlor. This is what Steadman suggested Vermeer did. Features of the paintings, such as perspective convergence and certain visual distortions, were characteristic of camera obscura images.
Hockney made bigger claims. He proposed that use of the camera obscura, along with convex mirrors and other optical gear, went far beyond Vermeer and a few other image makers. Caravaggio, for instance, seemed to him a master of staging tableaux vivants in his cellar and then copying what his array of gadgets yielded—in effect, creating a photographer's studio.
Hockney's proposals created a storm of controversy, with art historians, optical scientists, and cultural critics driven to fury. A common ad hominem complaint was that Hockney didn't draw well himself and used photography to help him, so he would naturally denigrate a draftsman of genius. You can see some links to the debate in this entry's codicil.
Steadman, a historian of architecture, used the perspective presented in the paintings to calculate the dimensions of the room and the placement of the camera obscura, and as a result he could measure the size of the projected images, which uncannily matched the size of the finished paintings. Tim took another direction.
By reflecting the camera obscura image into a hand mirror that he could position just above the picture in progress, Tim found that without training or talent he could copy a scene with astonishing accuracy. He started without a camera obscura, just using the hand mirror to paint an image from a photo of his father-in-law. The result encouraged him to go farther—much farther.
Tim's Vermeer documents Tim's painstaking process. He used 3D mapping to plot the space shown in The Music Lesson. He then built the room and furnished it with life-size replicas of the furniture and fittings. He ground authentic versions of the pigments and lenses used in Vermeer's era. He even found models to stand, fixed in place by clamps, while he painted, with infinitesimal slowness, the image caught by his lens and hand mirror. By trial and error he found that adding another mirror helped even more. He was painting from a three-dimensional scene, as captured on a camera obscura.
The entire project consumed 1825 days. Documentaries always document more than they intend to, and part of the film's attraction is its portrait of a man driven to the limit to test his hunches. His presence adds a human narrative to what could have been considered a dry academic debate. You have to wonder what Herzog would have made of this multimillionaire spending years trying to replicate a masterpiece.
Tim's obsession yielded a remarkably exact version of the scene done entirely by hand, eye, and optical devices. The film shows Hockney and Steadman approving Tim's picture as a valid "proof of concept," as he calls it.
The film is carefully clear about what Tim's demo didn't prove. He hasn't shown that Vermeer did it this way. We have in fact no written documents concerning how Vermeer produced his pictures, so our inferences are based wholly on the paintings and the historical circumstances. For example, Antony Van Leeuwenhoek, celebrated microscopist, lived in Delft at the same time and served as executor of Vermeer's estate. But no documents indicate that they discussed lenses, or even knew one another.
Nor has Tim proved that he's as good as Vermeer. Hockney insists that paintings are marks and "machines don't make marks." Vermeer's touch may be inimitable and owe nothing to optics.
And Tim hasn't supported Hockney's suggestion that there's no other way Vermeer could have gotten his distinctive look. Admittedly, thanks to perceptual psychologist Colin Blakemore, Tim found that Vermeer's pictures include visual phenomena that aren't available to our unaided eye, such as fine gradations of light on a pebbly surface. Still, perhaps Vermeer was familiar with optically generated images and imitated them, freehand, in his pictures. Perhaps he used a camera obscura simply as inspiration and a guide to visual discovery.
What Tim has shown is that a simple knowledge of how light behaves in mirrors and lenses–knowledge that was available in Vermeer's milieu—could enable someone to produce images of extraordinary accuracy and detail, if he or she were willing to expend a hell of a lot of time and trouble.
Lawrence Gowing suggests that to Vermeer the drudgery that Tim underwent was exhilarating.
It was in the camera cabinet perhaps, behind the thick curtains, that he entered the world of ideal, undemanding relationships. There he could spend the hours watching the silent women move to and fro.
Maybe Vermeer was, as Tim suggests, an ancestor of today's CGI geeks, toiling over his picture for days and weeks, though without the benefit of pizza and Mountain Dew. There are thousands of such people today. Were they around then too? Was Vermeer the first keyboard monkey?
The outsider's risk
Here are some objections to the Hockney-Steadman-Jenison line of argument. I don't think they're insurmountable.
There are always crank theories around. But although the public discussions of Hockney's thesis came close to calling him nuts, it's worth listening to an artist's conception of how another artist might work—especially when the skeptics aren't practicing artists themselves. Hockney isn't proposing the sort of numerological theories we get, say, in the film Room 237, or the "secret geometries" line of argument that maintains that every line and mass proves the artist was a Rosicrucian or a Freemason. Hockney's theory may be wrong, but it's not wacko.
Jenison is a naïve dabbler from outside the art world and lacks certified expertise. Again, it's not a matter of who floats an idea but how valid the idea is. Why couldn't a computer-graphics expert come up with enlightening ideas about pictures? Craftsmen in any domain often spot fine points that lay people can't.
Besides, insiders can be mistaken. Forgers have long fooled connoisseurs. The Smiling Girl picture above was shown as a Vermeer at London's Royal Academy in 1929, but now it's regarded as a fake.
It's too easy. If this were all there were to painting lifelike pictures, you might say, any kid could do it. Well, not many would have the patience. Tim spent 130 days painting the picture and he nearly gave up. It was stressful, hard on his back, and strewn with unexpected obstacles. He had to take frequent breaks. Freehand drawing is a lot easier, not to mention faster. Although Tim is no painter by training, he clearly has a careful eye and extreme fine motor control in his fingers. I, who can scarcely draw a straight line with a ruler, couldn't do what he did.
It's too hard. Tim's painstaking dabbing is laborious, others might grant, but it's donkey work. His conception of art is "difficulty of doing," but there are lots of things that are hard to do, like building ships in a bottle, and they aren't art. But all art requires discipline, and in those times experts labored for days over bits of the canvas that hardly anybody would notice. As a craft, painting is inherently hard, but we can scarcely imagine the amount of energy invested in the voluptuous images of Vermeer's period. Damien Hirst can whip up high-priced paintings fast for today's market, but conditions at that time would slow him down. He'd probably have to catch his own shark.
It's too reliant on technology. But art has used mechanical devices for centuries. The best examples, very relevant to Vermeer, are all the drawing aids associated with perspective, including not just straightedges and protractors but complex gadgets like Durer's famous converging-string setup that allowed him to draw curved volumes.
Such devices are shortcuts to deploying the geometry of the system. As Steadman says in the film, "Perspective is an algorithm."
Later eras have given us much art dependent on technology, from tubes of oil paint to Hockney's own Polaroid- and iPad-assisted imagery. And of course film and video art wouldn't exist without machines. Hockney puts it well from the standpoint of the practicing painter:
[Raphael] would have wanted to make as vivid a portrait as he could. As a professional painter, he had a job to do and would have used all the tools at his disposal, including, if he thought they would help, lenses. He would not think, "I'm a great artist at the height of the Renaissance who should disdain such methods."
Hockney and Steadman report that practicing artists they've encountered have been far less hostile to their ideas than art historians have been.
It insults greatness. I suppose this is what Susan Sontag meant by saying, "If David Hockney's thesis is correct, it would be a bit like finding out that all the great lovers of history have been using Viagra."
Actually, the copying of a camera obscura image isn't as mechanical as one might think, but even if it were, would it be devastating? We allow photographers, with their mechanisms for intercepting light rays, the status of great artists.
The objection rests on a valid point. We do need to know something of how an artwork was made in order to understand and judge it. But in this case I don't think that discovering that Vermeer used mechanical aids would minimize our appreciation of the pictures. It might, however, change our sense of how he relates to the traditions that followed. This change in our understanding is something Hockney and Jenison hope to bring about.
It dispells the mystery. This is the toughest argument to counter because it assumes that we want mystery in our art. It seems to me ultimately a religious way of thinking about art. I'm enough of a rationalist to hope that in any area, research can turn some mysteries into puzzles, then turn puzzles into problems, and maybe solve some of the problems.
There'll always be a residue of questions we can't answer. Given the feeble progress we've made in understanding art, no one should worry. We researchers nibble at the edges, and the Big Mysteries aren't going away any time soon. In the meantime, we can ask whether Tim, along with Hockney, Steadman, and others, has answered some worthwhile questions about how Vermeer made his pictures.
My wish list
Here are some matters that a longer film would probably have been able to tackle. I'd love to see a version that did.
How does Vermeer fit into the broader history of art? The painting traditions in which Vermeer worked—genre scenes, portraiture, perspective–aren't articulated in the film. In addition, the use of the camera obscura by other painters could be brought out. Perhaps the assumption is that Hockney covered that territory.
Still, to avoid certain accusations, it might have been better to grant that artists blend talent, training, and hard work with selective knowledge of what earlier artists have done, and what rivals are up to. E. H. Gombrich emphasizes the various factors involved: the tasks that artists undertake, their tools, their techniques (including inherited visual patterns, or schemas), the problems inherent in a project, and the artist's circumstances, such as competition with other artists and the fluctuating tastes of their audience.
The exactitude of Vermeer's interiors, for instance, is in tune with contemporary Dutch paintings of household routines (so-called genre painting) and of still-life paintings of foods glistening on a tabletop. There was a taste for meticulous presentation of everyday life at the time, and this probably impelled Vermeer toward his unique brand of realism. Was he trying to top his rivals? The film suggests that his delicacy and precision surpass what's on display in contemporaries like Pieter de Hooch.
What counts as realism? Vermeer's pictures look fantastically accurate, and have for some time. But he selects only certain dimensions of reality to capture. Other painters focus on movement, which is all but absent from Vermeer's images. There's a snapshot quality to Baroque representations of figures in action, which look scarily realistic. And many other painters render details that impress from a distance or even close up; Jan Van Eyck is probably the most famous.
What about the lenses and mirrors? Tim goes to great lengths to mimic the features of Vermeer's room and to mix paints as he might have. The film is mostly silent, though, about his optical devices. What focal lengths were the lenses in camera obscuras? We know that different focal lengths render perspective in differing ways. Some of the distortions commentators have found in Vermeer's picture seem to proceed from wide-angle coverage. Moreover, Tim's hand mirror and convex mirror seem to be modern ones. Are these enough like what Vermeer would have had available?
Did Vermeer alter the perspective projection he obtained? Many painters who calculated perspective felt free to adjust it or confound it for the sake of expressive effect. Famous pictures are full of inconsistent vanishing points, often masked by figures or items of setting. Tim's painting obeyed what his camera gave him, but perhaps Vermeer adjusted his image. Consider, below, some details from Vermeer's picture (left) with Tim's (right). (Ignore color differentials, since the reproductions of the original vary so much.)
Did Vermeer fiddle with what the camera showed? I'm not thinking so much of the disparities in the placement of the figures above, which are probably to be expected; we'd be shocked if Tim's setup worked exactly the same as Vermeer's. I'm more concerned with the way in which Vermeer seems to have cheated perspective with respect to the reflection.
It looks as if Tim tried to match the reflection, but to do that he had to have his daughter turn slightly to the right. Yet Vermeer's young woman faces the mirror head-on, while the reflection shows her in high-angle three-quarter view. Was the mirror slightly tipped on the left edge? And did it hang out from the wall slightly more than in Tim's chamber? I wonder if Vermeer simply wanted to have it both ways–a head turned squarely away from us, a reflected face that wouldn't be gazing straight out but rather pensively downward. Classic pictures often contain such expressive compromises with geometrical exactness.
Do we overrate the clean image? Tim, coming from the computer-graphics world, seems to have accepted the current assumption that the most faithful and attractive image is razor-sharp. He's fascinated by the undeniably exact textures on the fabric and the wood and plaster surfaces. He thinks that Vermeer 's images resemble "a video signal" and that they glow like the images on a movie screen (that is, nowadays, a digital image).
But Tim's High-Def aesthetic plays down some of painting's traditional resources, notably sfumato. And art historian E. H. Gombrich notes that Vermeer's precision retains "mellowed outlines" and doesn't seem harshly photographic. Going back to the details above, to my eye, Vermeer's image isn't as sharp as Tim's. The faces are sketchier, and the shadows have softer contours.
Gombrich and others have made much of the crucial role of suggestion and incompleteness in painting, especially paintings that are seen at a distance. Our perceptual systems fill in dashes and blobs with specific features, but Tim's algorithm may chop too fine. The difference should give comfort to the people who emphasize Vermeer's idiosyncratic paint handling. It would be worth seeing if Tim thinks he could recalibrate his pictorial mesh to soften the image somewhat.
Problems and solutions
Tim's Vermeer is an entertaining lesson in how rational inquiry into the arts proceeds—posing a problem and then using inference and evidence to frame possible solutions. The film also shows how a problem usually has many facets, which sometimes have to be dealt with piecemeal.
A piecemeal approach is particularly pertinent to reconstructing Vermeer's methods. Many art historians would grant that he, like others, might have used a camera obscura to imagine or sketch out the basic composition of the piece. But the crucial later phases of painting would have been carried out by eye and hand unaided. What is characteristic of the Hockney—Steadman—Jenison line is they try to indicate how much of Vermeer's practice can be accounted for by optical aids.
Assume that Vermeer used a booth-type camera obscura. That device could yield general contours. Steadman charted other features of the camera obscura that show up in the master's paintings, such as variable focus, light scattering, and perspectival distortion characteristic of lenses. He went on to build a scale model of the room depicted in The Music Lesson and other pictures, and showed that Vermeer might have used a booth-type camera obscura. With the cooperation of the BBC, Steadman built a life-size model of the system he discovered.
Reading Steadman's brilliant book when it appeared, and then visiting his website where things are spelled out a little more, pretty much convinced me of his argument. But I didn't think much about lighting or color.
Vermeer's "mellowed outlines" are often given by minute shadings of tonality rather than firm outlines. Yet when you're in the booth, it's so dark that you can't determine color accurately. This is where Tim Jenison comes in. What sort of optical device could yield such gradations of color?
Tim discovered that a small mirror mounted on a rod over the drawing surface would allow an artist to build color patches, as well as masses and contours, by slightly shifting her gaze from the mirror's reflection of the camera's image to the picture being made. You've achieved the right tonality, Tim points out, when the edge of the mirror seems to disappear. In this image, the disc you see isn't clear glass but rather a mirror reflecting the camera obscura's image, which is outside the frame.
Dim light in the booth doesn't matter because both the image and the color you match are illuminated uniformly. The result, in the film, shows a remarkable degree of similarity.
But the optical projection remains a bit pale and lacking in detail; more concentrated and focused light is needed. Teller's film shows how Tim hit upon the idea of focusing and brightening the camera image by projecting it onto a concave mirror rather than a flat plane. A mirror is also a projecting surface, and its reflection can amplify the camera lens's image. With this array of lenses and mirrors, you don't need to work in darkness and you don't need a barrier between you and the scene.
At this point, Tim's demo has demolished the darkened chamber itself. Maybe this is what Vermeer actually used, although if he wanted to hide his methods, the booth with its wall or curtain would have been preferable.
Another lesson in rational inquiry: Controlling for variables can encourage anomalies to pop out. In drawing the harpsichord in the picture, Tim had assumed straight edges, which he outlines with a ruler. But in painting the undulating seahorse motif on the surface, he discovered that his lens rendered the motif as very slightly curved. When you check the painting, you find that Vermeer's motif does the same thing.
The curve, which Tim dubbed "The Vermeer Smile," is characteristic of the distortion yielded by a lens. Your eye and brain don't see it that way, however, and painters working freehand would automatically make the seahorses prance in a straight line.
In short, just as Vermeer's lens may have allowed him to make discoveries about the behavior of light, Tim's lens gave him a new insight into Vermeer's art.
Photography without film
Suppose we buy the whole package. Assume that Vermeer used Tim Jenison's hardware. What then does his art consist of?
In Film Art: An Introduction we distinguish four areas of cinema technique: mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, and sound. Editing and sound aren't relevant to Vermeer (though Eisenstein might make an argument for "montage" operating within the master's "shots"). But the other techniques are, if we imagine him making unmoving movies—that is, photographs.
Mise-en-scene involves what is photographed. Vermeer controls the setting, picks the props, and costumes, and arranges the lighting. He determines the color within the scene. He also stages the action, although there isn't much movement. Gombrich calls his paintings "still lifes with human beings."
Cinematography has an equivalent in Vermeer's art too. He must select a lens for the camera obscura, and he has to focus it. Most commentators agree that painters who used the device focused on different areas of the scene as they needed to paint them. Vermeer doesn't use film, of course, but he does have paint, and the properties of that medium have to be taken into account. In Tim's words, as he sits brushing in tiny strokes, "I'm a piece of human photographic film."
Vermeer also has to frame the scene, which is a bit tricky because the camera obscura doesn't yield a rectangular image but rather a circular one. Here is Steadman's reconstruction of the camera's visual output, flipped to match the painting and reproduced in black and white.
Vermeer has to crop the projected image in advance, much as a cinematographer today has to visualize the image's final shape as seen on the viewfinder or monitor.
Staging and framing in The Music Lesson yield an unusual composition. What's the subject of the painting? The woman playing? She's turned from us, seen from afar, and quite decentered. True, she's reflected in the mirror. But Steadman shows that this mirror is ambiguously drawn. It also seems to be angled so as to conceal the opposite end of the room—a ploy familiar to scholars of early cinema, when such tipped mirrors hide the movie camera.
Thanks to the oddly empty space in the left half of the picture, our attention drifts often to the empty space separating window, furniture, and people. Vermeer is in effect painting the journey of light hitting various surfaces. The streaming sunlight endows a patch of the rug, the bottom of the viola, and the upholstery tacks with a glow and brightens the woman's sleeve. Then it thins into a more diffuse illumination before hitting the jug as a brilliant pictorial climax.
Perhaps he's painting how air looks.
Vermeer's zones of choice and control overlap with those of a photographer or a filmmaker. Or those of an illusionist. As stage magicians, Penn and Teller know the classic putdown: "Aw, they do it with mirrors." The film might be their answer: "Yeah, and it works." They and Tim Jenison have created a landmark film that ponders the interplay of science, tools, and artistic creativity.
Special thanks to Michael Barker of Sony Pictures Classics and Merijoy Endrizzi-Ray of Sundance Madison. Thanks as well to Kristin Thompson, Diane Verma, and Darlene Bordwell for conversations about the film.
The controversy over Hockney's theses can be traced in the Wikipedia entry The Hockney-Falco Thesis. My quotation from Susan Sontag comes from Wyatt Mason on ArtKrush. The camera obscura image of The Music Lesson comes from Philip Steadman, Vermeer's Camera, p. 123, as does my Lawrence Gowing quotation (p. 165). I'm grateful to Steadman on many levels, not least because his website encouraged me, in 2002, to set up the one you're visiting now.
For further information on the general research area, see Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat. Kemp corresponded at length with Hockney, and portions of their exchanges are included in Secret Knowledge.
Gombrich's comments on Vermeer come from Chapter 20 of The Story of Art. His classic Art and Illusion elaborates his account of inherited pictorial schemas and their revision across history.
Hockney has defended the film and explained further. Kurt Anderson has offered a valuable overview of the making of Tim's Vermeer in Vanity Fair. Several video interviews cast light on the process as well. Here Teller, Penn, and Jenison discuss the film with Kent Jones at Lincoln Center. David Poland sits down for a 30-minute interview with Penn and Jenison. Philip Steadman discusses how Tim's ideas build on his book in this University College London video.
Jonathan Janson's site offers good coverage of the film's reception, here and here.
One reviewer considers Tim's theory "wackadoodle" but misunderstands it, saying that "Vermeer might have created his masterpieces by putting his models in a camera obscura." Then he told them scary stories in the dark, I guess. More attentive reviews of the movie include one by Peter DeBruge in Variety and another by Todd McCarthy in The Hollywood Reporter.
You know Penn and Teller as conjurors and hosts of the show Bullshit! (My favorite episode: the animal mind-reader.) Be sure to read their books too.
Team Vermeer: Standing: Philip Steadman, Teller, Tim Jenison. Seated: David Hockney, Penn Gillette.
PS 12 March 2014: Painter Jane Jelley has proposed a way that Vermeer could have made his pictures using a camera obscura but without mirrors. She reports success replicating that method herself. Her article and some background to her experiment are available here. I thank Ms. Jelley for writing me with this information. The controversy continues, which makes me happy.
Film-industry pros share secrets in Vancouver
Kristin here:
Even while tempting us with many, many films, the Vancouver International Film Festival runs an event that could all too easily lure us away from viewing and into the world of film-industry gurus: the Film and Television Forum. Its website describes it as "four days of professional development for senior and emerging professionals, from financing to production, to marketing and distribution, to storytelling and engagement."
In an ideal world, we would attend all of the sessions, but they run concurrently with as many as eight films showing elsewhere. Two talks were particularly appealing, though, given our interest in the practice of making films within the mainstream American industry. I slipped away to hear master-classes by Terry Rossio (screenwriter for all of the Pirates of the Caribbean films) and Walter Murch (editor of Particle Fever, shown at the festival, and sound designer on many films, including Apocalypse Now).
Terry Rossio
Rossio's modest title was "Revisions," though his discussion ranged far beyond advice on how to rewrite a script. He immediately won over the audience, clearly many of them professional or aspiring screenwriters, by passing around a flash-drive and inviting anyone with a script-in-progress on their laptop to put some pages on it. He would end the session by making some impromptu revisions of those pages.
I'm not secretly working on a screenplay or even aspiring to write one, but if I were, I think I would have gleaned some valuable tips from Rossio's talk.
Most panels and seminars tend to be too general, he said. They "focus on the business side, tell personal anecdotes," and so on. He feels that it is probably impossible to teach screenwriting: "No, the better question is, can writing be learned?" Yes, but people must teach themselves.
Writing and revising
To Rossio, one crucial thing to learn is that finishing a story is not the end. One should have both doubt and faith: doubt that a story or scene is good enough, and faith that it can be better.
Revision, according to Rossi, is "talent reapplied." One may have a limited amount of talent for writing, but it can be stretched by reapplying it over and over during the revision process.
Rossio is a big advocate of succinctly creating a strong visual sense in each scene. Even on Rossio's desktop he comes up with a distinctive icon for each folder (see top): a Rubik's cube for "Screenwriting," a little gramophone for "Music," and so on.
For Rossio, each scene should consist of:
- Opening image
- Key moment (character revelations, reversals, etc.)
- Throw (i.e., the setup for the next scene)
Apart from visual imagery, writing should be situation-based: "Every scene you write must be an obvious situation." A screenplay is a string of situations, which creates a compelling interest in the scene. His example was two people discussing an important deal in a car on the way to a meeting. The dialogue might become boring because of the static setting, but the writer could make them experience car trouble and have their discussion outside the car while worrying whether they will make it to the meeting: "The easiest way to create interest is through some sort of dilemma."
One important technique of revision is what Rossio calls "performance dialogue." Writers tend to compose speeches in full, grammatical sentences, but that doesn't sound natural in spoken dialogue. Rossio takes these complete sentences and starts to eliminate words: "Less words allows for performance the actor will be performing in between the syllables." He adds, "If you give an actor a very long line, they can't manipulate that into an emotion. But a shorter line allows them to express the subtext or nuance of what's going on."
This advice led to a question from the audience about how a writer can convey to the director and actors what he or she intended the nuances of a scene to be. Rossio suggested three possibilities:
- Become a director. The director is the one who puts things on the screen. The writer makes suggestions about what to put on the screen.
- Negotiate having the power to be on set during shooting.
- Annotate the screenplay.
The third point caused quite a bit of interest and is an unusual approach that Rossio himself has recently adopted. He writes a normal script, fairly compact and easy to read. But he includes endnote numbers that refer to a separate document, a list of annotations. These might be something like an indication that a certain moment in the film is a reference to the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark or suggestions about special camera angles. Rossio has not used this tactic often enough to gauge whether directors in general would appreciate it, but he did have a good response to the first annotated script he provided.
Rossio dislikes all the screenwriting software on the market, but he showed off a system that he devised himself. The screen below shows the list of scenes for his current project, Masters of the Universe. Each scene is identified by a single word, such as "Vengeance" or "Snake." The ones that are finished are highlighted in color. (I don't believe Rossio mentioned the difference between the purple and the yellow highlighting.) The scenes can be switched in order with their labels automatically re-numbered.
One advantage of this system is that the author opens only one scene rather than the whole script. Dealing with something that may be about four pages long is less overwhelming. Rossio also finds that his system facilitates sharing drafts of scenes with a collaborator.
Tips for pitching
In keeping with his emphasis on the visual aspects of a screenplay, Rossio recommends that writers make up a brief pre-viz that captures the essence of the script's premise. Increasingly, software is becoming available that would allow technically adept writers to create demo clips on their own. For writers unable to do this, Rossio suggests that in a highly competitive market, they should get an effects house to do the job for them. These days even some directors are using this approach in trying to get a job.
Rossio was asked a question about pitching to get a job revising an existing script. He had four suggestions.
First, read the script that is to be revised. Surprisingly, not all writers do that. If it's based on a literary property, read that, too. A lot of writers just wing such pitch meetings.
Second, take along a presentation board. It can be used for breaking down the script or drawing images.
Third, write a recap of the script as it exists and be ready to discuss specific possible changes.
Fourth, go to the trouble of having two or three specific images ready to show. If the VIPs like the images, they can get access to them only by hiring the writer.
I think if I were a scriptwriter, aspiring or otherwise, I would consider that Rossio packed a lot of useful information into his 75-minute presentation. He also chose two of the script excerpts submitted by audience members and gave their authors some quick and helpful suggestions for revisions.
Walter Murch
As far as I could tell, Murch's talk had no title, but the concept he threw out early on was "fungibility," one meaning of which is being capable of changing easily. The example he gave was a caterpillar changing into a butterfly. Murch was referring to the digital revolution in film editing. This was not so much a how-to talk as an attempt to demonstrate the dramatic changes that have come about as a result of rapidly changing technologies.
Murch showed a photo of himself struggling with 35mm film strips in editing Apocalypse Now in the 1970s (above). Now, of course, there would be no such physical sorting and splicing. He then pointed out the sheer weight of film, which has been entirely eliminated:
As the graphic shows, a single 1000-foot reel of 35mm film weighs 11 pounds. The strips of Apocalypse Now in the photo above were part of workprint material totaling 7 tons. If Murch's latest film, Particle Fever, had been edited on 35mm, he would have had to deal with far more, 16 tons of film. It simply would have been impossible to edit such a quantity of footage. (Would a hard-drive with a complete feature film on it weight measurably more than a blank one? he wondered.)
For Particle Fever, Murch used Final Cut Pro 7–an announcement that led to scattered applause from the audience. Like Murch, users of that program are loyal to it, but as he pointed out, a 32-bit program simply can't keep up with modern demands for memory. While editing, he kept running into situations where there was no memory left, and he had to use elaborate and time-consuming methods to free up storage space. (The film ended up with 18 terabytes of material stored.) On his current project, Tomorrowland, he is using a 64-bit Avid program and has had no problem running out of memory.
(Tomorrowland is being made here in Vancouver, which is presumably why we had the privilege of Murch's participation in the forum.)
Murch showed a timeline graphic for Particle Fever, with multiple image track, dialogue tracks, effects tracks, musical tracks, and so on. Each small horizontal line represents a separate track:
Even while working on this level of complex technology, however, Murch sticks to simple methods for some of his planning. He creates a "scene board" using cards coded with colors, sizes, and shapes . The little green triangles create a chronology, giving the years covered by each set of scenes:
As with Rossio's system of storing his scenes in a way that allows him to change their order, Murch can move the cards around if the structure of the film changes. Murch put it this way: "I would suggest reversion to kindergarten."
He also showed some photos of his workspaces for various projects. One was intriguing for indicating how important perspective is for editing. One workroom contained a 50-inch monitor for playing back scenes as he edits them. (See bottom.) Note the little white figures of a man and a woman at the bottom corners of the screen. Murch wanted to keep scale in mind, and the figures represent normal-sized people at the proportionate size they would appear if the monitor were a forty-foot theatrical screen.
This photo inspired someone during the question session to ask whether the increasing tendency for people to watch movies on very small digital screens has influenced Murch's editing decisions. He replied that it has to some extent, though from the beginning of his career at the end of the 1960s he has had to keep the smaller television screen in mind. Yet he does not edit primarily for the tiny images on mobile devices: "If you cut for the big screen, it will work for the small screen. If you cut for the small screen, it won't work as well for the big screen." The Master speaks. So far, the theatrical experience remains the basis for moviemaking.
The Guardian has a video interview with Walter Murch discussing Particle Fever.
A monitor in Walter Murch's workspace, with two white human figures at the lower corners to indicate scale.
VIFF extremes
The Missing Picture (2013).
DB here:
The Vancouver International Film Festival, known to all as VIFF, has been undergoing some big changes. It lost its primary venue, an ageing but cozy multiplex surrounded by pubs, creperies, music clubs, and other marks of downtown culture. Alas, the Empire Granville 7 is now shuttered, to be renovated as a retail space. VIFF must spread its bounty more widely.
As before, films are shown at the Cinematheque and the Vancity media center. The new venues include the Vancouver Playhouse, the Rio Theatre, three screens at the Cineplex Odeon International Village, the Vancouver Centre for the Performing Arts, and the Goldcorp Centre for the Arts at Simon Frazer University. All the ones we've visited have been excellent screening spaces.
Everything we've seen has been on some form of video—excuse me, "digital cinema." Apart from the occasional 35mm or HDCam show, DCP projection, after a couple of years of teething pains, is the norm. Not that this guarantees uniformity. Albert Serra's Story of My Death, a peculiar portrait of the elderly Casanova, still looked (probably intentionally) like it was shot on VHS. The furor about festivals' conversion to digital formats, discussed in this 2012 blog entry and extended in my little e-book, belongs firmly to history. Henceforth film festivals will be file festivals.
Genres plain and fancy
El Mudo.
As usual at VIFF, the range is wide. At one end of the scale is a feel-good dramedy like The Great Passage, Japan's Academy Award entry. The central character is Majime, a shy and unworldly young linguist who is drafted to help create a dictionary of Japanese as a living language. An otaku when it comes to words, he soon devotes his life to fulfilling the mission. Over the years he manages to find a girlfriend and earn the respect of the elders steering the project and the friendship of a ne'er-do-well colleague who prefers alcohol to etymologies. The dweeb Majime, despite his sweater-vests and sleeve protectors, becomes moderately sociable, while his pal acknowledges that his own commitment to a geeky endeavor shows he's not as cool as he thought.
The English title is misleading; a better one might be Crossing the Sea of Language, since the central metaphor is that of charting the ebb and flow of usage. The process is dramatized by setting the start of the project in 1995, before Internet 2.0. The professor overseeing the project points out that the arrival of the Web speeds up language change. The Net works its way into the plot, as card-based research gets replaced by algorithms and word searches. A lot of the film's humor arises when sequestered scholars, like those in Ball of Fire, have to figure out what this younger generation means when it calls something bad (i.e., good).
Ishii Yuya, who brought to VIFF Sawako Decides (2010) and Mitsuko Delivers (2011), tells his heart-warming story in a trim, efficient manner. His composure could teach our Hollywood directors a thing or two. I didn't see a wasted shot or gratuitous camera movement, and you might miss Ishii's virtuoso handling of a crowded office space as volunteers pack in to beat the deadline.
You can often spot a director's skill in delicate touches. Here, I admired a gentle hook between two scenes. Majime has written a florid, anachronistic letter to Kaguya declaring his fondness for her. At the end of one scene he walks away from the camera clutching the note, which the framing centers on. Cut to a distant shot of him with Kaguya, the letter a small detail alongside his left leg.
Most viewers, I'm convinced, scan to find the letter and then wait with an amused tension for Majime to awkwardly offer it. It's a good example of gradation of emphasis: No need for a close-up at the start of the second scene. This sort of unforced, easygoing presentation of a plot with a serious point—the quiet heroism of committing yourself to something of value to your community—makes The Great Passage as much worth exporting to North America as Departures and Shall We Dance? have proved in years past.
A more offbeat genre film is El Mudo, a Peruvian quasi-thriller, quasi-comedy from Daniel Vega and Diego Vega. After a day of dreary complaints and insults, the magistrate Constantino finds his car window smashed. What else is new? Soon after, he's driving through traffic and is apparently wounded by a sniper. He loses his voice but becomes doggedly determined to uncover what he thinks is a conspiracy.
Constantino is not your raging rogue investigator. His muteness only increases a fixed, slightly scowling demeanor that suggests stoicism, boredom, or emotional vacuity. He refuses to perform the exercises that might strengthen his voice, as if he welcomes the loss of one more channel of expression. Everyone else seems normal, but Constantino (played superbly by Fernando Bacilio) might have walked out of an Aki Kaurismaki movie. The filming is in tune with the protagonist–static and prolonged shots, shrewd but unemphatic angles that simply wait for something to happen.
The result is an anti-action film. The assassination attempt, if that's indeed what it is, is merely a bump in what is otherwise a drab long take filmed from the back seat of Constantino's car. After waiting for a traffic light to change, he proceeds and suddenly slumps sideways as we hear four faint cracking sounds and watch the car drift onto the curb.
When the case is solved (perhaps) during a police raid, poor Constantino waits outside and so merely glimpses the stunt that would get visceral treatment in another movie. By the end, he finally smiles with pleasure, revealing himself as at a memory of maternal affection; he's a mama's boy after all. Il Mudo is a continuous pleasure throughout and is to be recommended to any fan of deadpan grotesque.
Many missing images
We've suggested, in both Film Art and elsewhere on this site, that a documentary film can be highly artificial. As long as it purports to make claims about the nonfictional world, the film can stage scenes and even use animation to support its points. A new test of this idea has come along in the form of Rithy Panh's muted but powerful memoir of Khmer Rouge atrocities, The Missing Picture.
It employs some documentary conventions, like newsreel footage and voice-over commentary, but it seeks to present what was never put on film at the time. Panh's family is shipped out of Phnom Penh, sent to forced labor and starvation in the countryside. Medical experiments are conducted with humans. Children are forced to pound out fertilizer and haul bodies to burial pits. The Party cadres, of course, eat well. Western intellectuals may have praised the Khmer Rouge as disciplined Communist idealists, but "the revolution they promised exists only on film." How do you show what was never shown, not even widely known?
To provide a counter-film, Panh fills tabletop tableaus with carved clay figures. By the hundreds, these little effigies populate toy settings of work camps, hospitals that are merely storehouses for the dying, and landscapes that call forth children's fantasies of escape and memories of happy family life. The figures themselves, squat and chunky, wear emblematic clothes–most often, gray work pajamas–and bear hollow-eyed expressions hinting at sullen fear or merely numbness. Panh's childhood self is clothed, against all orders, in a pink shirt with yellow dots, which not only lets us identify him but suggests his yearning for the world of color that the Khmer stamped out.
As The Missing Picture proceeds, it becomes more reflexive. The Khmer officials show their propaganda films to the camp audiences, and Panh takes the opportunity to show his figures gathered and obediently watching. At the end, he reminds us that those who resisted are still wandering among us, like ghosts. Some things, he grants, should not be seen or known. "But should any of us see or know them, then he must live to tell of them."
VIFF may be living in many new houses, but it's definitely living, and as splendidly as ever.
The Empire Granville 7 was the last remaining movie house on Vancouver's Theatre Row, which at one time had over twenty theatres. On the Granville 7's future as retail space, a story is here. This article mentions that the Granville 7 originally absorbed a theatre called the Coronet. Cinema Treasures supplies more details of Granville 7 history. Images of the interior demolition of the house are here.


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Dar es Salaam — With one week left before the start of the Zone V Club Basketball Championships, Uganda's Kyambogo Warriors, one of the best sides in the region, have pulled out.
The Warriors, where Tanzanian Abdallah Ramadhan "Dibo" was trading his skills, cited lack of funds as a major reason for their failure to make a trip to Dar es Salaam.
The weeklong event is expected to start on October 8 at the National Indoor Stadium and Tanzania Basketball Federation (TBF) assistant secretary general Michael Maluwe assured fans that preparations were on course.
Commenting on Kyambogo's withdrawal, Maluwe said it was a big blow for they expected all big teams to battle it out in the championships."Preparations for the championships are in to gear, the TBF is looking forward to having many leading teams in the event.
"Kyambogo Warriors are a great team that we did not want to miss the championship, but they are strapped for cash and there is nothing we can do, it's a big blow," he said.
The turnaround from the MTN-Fuba losing finalists implies that Miracle Eagles can now travel to Dar es Salaam as one of the two Ugandan men's sides as a replacement for the weeklong event.
"We have failed to raise the money so I confirm that we have pulled out and communicated to Fuba," a frustrated Brian Gumisiriza, the Warriors team manager, said on Wednesday. Fuba vice-president Patrick Egwel has consequently written to Miracle to take the slot along with champions DMark Power who are expected to confirm or pull out by today.
Power team manager Philip Kyomuhendo was quoted as saying that they would compete in the annual tournament, which would be the first they play outside Uganda in 10 years.

subset: commoncrawl


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A group for everyone who played virtual magic kingdom. ( it will always be missed)
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Click here for the Washington County News.
Web edition of WCN for Aug. 10
Published: Monday, August 12, 2013 at 04:24 PM.
Click here for the Washington County News.
Reader comments posted to this article may be published in our print edition. All rights reserved. This copyrighted material may not be re-published without permission. Links are encouraged.


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Microsoft is facing accusations that it sat on critical flaws for more than two years before patching.The flaws in ActiveX controls for Office were patched in Microsoft's latest security update but according to the security researchers at TippingPoint Technologies, they reported the bugs to Microsoft in March 2007.The firm was reluctant to criticise Microsoft but said the flaws were reported well in advance and were being used by attackers for weeks before the patches were issued.Microsoft maintains that creating patches is more difficult than it is for other companies, since it has a massive install base running different configurations of its software.Each patch must be tested on each system, thus creating a long lead time, but some have questioned why the company took so long on flaws that it described as 'critical'.With many private security researchers reporting flaws to the company, there is a limit to the amount of time that can be spent solving each one, but it seems Microsoft is being laggardly in fixing problems until attacks are reported in the wild.
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Issue: 339 | June 2015
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With Instructables you can share what you make with the world and tap into an ever-growing community of creative experts.
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The seed is a very simple one its called (begin)
First of all get your main resource wood!
I have found a nice little place to start
Some main starter wooden tools
A little hovel so i dont die a terrible death from mobs
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Light ze place up
Chests,furnaces,crafting bench, door
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Make a Financial Donation
Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to support the work of the Round Lake Library. You can mail or drop off a check, or for your convenience, you can make your donation via PayPal!
Build a Future
The Round Lake Library is a community library, supported by individuals and corporations in the Town of Malta and Village of Round Lake.
With the expansion into our new branch, community support is even more vital. We need to fill shelves with books, DVDs, and magazines. We need to equip our technology centers with computers, projectors, and other audio-visual equipment. We need the extras that make a library work for its patrons—projectors, printers, and copiers.
We recognize that in these economic times, you want to know where your money is going, and so we invite you to select particular items in our catalog and make your tax-deductible donation directly for that item. In return, we will recognize you with a bookplate, plaque, or other notice of recognition that says you helped us Build a Future.
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Let me be very clear. You should Retweet on Twitter. You should acknowledge others by retweeting. It is appropriate to retweet a group of people when in a large conversation.
However, simply retweeting a group of twitter usernames over and over and over is pointless. Not only is it annoying to the poor souls that are caught up in such behavior, but worse than that it isn't engagement and will do nothing to build relationships.
Friday I got into it on Twitter with someone that was doing this with the others in a large group. Usually I just ignore such behavior, however this had gone on for so long, I finally requested that they stop. My mention stream was so cluttered with the worthless activity it was becoming difficult to maintain the real conversations that I had going.
After the subsequent disagreement and unfollow of the "Social Media Innovator" that was perpetuating the endless RT'ing, I decided to do a video to demonstrate the real life equivalent of this activity to make a point. Please excuse my epic fail of forgetting to turn on the video capture during our Google Hangout, but I think not having the video has emphasized the point further.
Prepare to be annoyed. *note (the main point is made in the first 1:20 of the below video)
Wasn't that really hard to listen to? Worse that first 1 minute of audio would clearly do nothing to build relationship between the group, had no conversation and isn't effective.
I have said this 1000 times. The only hard fast rule in social media marketing is do not spam. All of the rest of the things I write about and suggest are simply guides to help you be effective. Having said that, sometimes the most annoying and most ineffective practices will get you unfollowed, unfriended or even blocked by many.
To be clear here, I am not referring to the RT of a follow Friday mention. However, when that follows the same pattern of RT every time someone else Retweets it, that falls under the same category as well.
A good rule of thumb on social media marketing activity is to be sure you know why you are doing what you are doing. Don't just do things you see others doing if you do not understand the reason and benefit. This will keep you out of trouble.
I have found that it is more important in social media to know and understand what NOT to do, then it is to know what TO DO. Don't do things that annoy others and are not effective. :-)
Robert M. Caruso
Founder/CEO – Bundle Post


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2013 Hyundai Genesis Coupe vs Ford Mustang Performance Package
If they wouldnt have cheaped out on the mustang it would of won.
--------------------Current vehicles 67 cougar,72 corvette, 75 corvette, 77 firebird, 96 camaro, 98 deville, 00 Monte Carlo, 03 f-150, 04 trailblazer, 07 malibu, 07 caliber
inside mustang has 90% cheap china made plastic. max speed is 113 MPH. i guess china tran made can not handle and the fuel economy is only 18.3 MPG(19~31 my ASS). at the price of $24k~$70K. what a POS!!!
Turtle-Power:If they wouldnt have cheaped out on the mustang it would of won.This thread will not survive. LOLRight, The V6 Mustang is the lesser version so.. it sort of lack "its intended limit" which was saved for higher trim, "the V8 trim." Rspec vs. V6+Performance pkg. would be pretty fair. which both ring around 25k+. My personal choice.. if I had limited budget below 30k I'd definitely choose the GC no contest. If you push further than 30k budget then... the V8 or the convertible which the GC doesn't offer. that's something else.My side comment... the Mustang interior is so 90s.
If I were buying a 2 door v6 powered car the gc would be it for me.
The GC sounds like a great performing car but is in Mustang 5.0 territory on price. I'd rather have a 5.0 over either of these cars so not much to argue about. Why oh why does Ford have a low speed limiter on a performance package V6? The suspension is superior to my GT and I'm sure the powertrain can handle 150 mph. Mine is limited to 145 mph so why not this?
_______________________________Have you driven a Coyote... lately?
so the most powerful v6 FORD has offered for is one of the slowest car on the planet? 113 MPH with v6 300 HP with all PP SSh1t add on?? with 18.3 MPG average? 80s~90s interior china made plastic everywhere??? in even the 10 years ++110 HP civic 1/3 of stang HP FASTER then this POS!!!
That is 0.3 mpg better than the Accord V6 coupe manual. The Mustang is 70% U.S. parts content and is a decent interior for the money. The Civic sucks so bad it needed a refresh one yearafter a new generation and still sucks.
_______________________________Have you driven a Coyote... lately?
I'll admit the speed limiter being so low is pathetic and puzzling at the same time.
_______________________________Have you driven a Coyote... lately?
Ford obviously sucks and that's why the v6 Mustang can't go over 115 mph without breaking something. My 2.5l Legacy with 170 hp can go 20mph higher. Hahahahhaa.Good Ford's = Flex (Looks awesome), Mustang GT ( Look decent and a great performer). Too bad the rear end on the Mustang sucks.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _I love pooping while on the clock.
"Heavily worn rear tires probably played a role here"Probably attributed to the higher lap time.Thang please learn to type or get off your mom's computer.
..Oops!Toyota quality '96 Mustang GT-152,000'01 Focus ZX3-RIP 10/30/13"A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have." "I'm terribly sorry, I ran over your dog...in my Jaaaaag."-Hammondmolon labe
I don't want to hear the "If X car had Y it would've won" crap. If then Gen Coupe had the Tau 5.0 V8 maybe it would crush a GT. I've always said the Gen Coupe was a good car and this proves it.
=\/=DD: 1995 Mazda Miata M EditionToy: 04 Honda VFR800 Interceptor named Phoenix (nicknamed VTAK)
You just said you didn't want to hear that talk
_______________________________Have you driven a Coyote... lately?
I was making a point. The what ifs can go all day.
=\/=DD: 1995 Mazda Miata M EditionToy: 04 Honda VFR800 Interceptor named Phoenix (nicknamed VTAK)


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KDL Recommends For Kids > Award Winners and "Best of" Lists > Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award Winners
KDL Recommends
Minty: A Story of Young Harriet Tubman
Title: Minty: A Story of Young Harriet Tubman
Author: Alan Schroeder
KDL Description:
Young Harriet Tubman, whose
childhood name was Minty, dreams of escaping slavery on the Brodas plantation in the late 1820s.
Amazon Description:
Many people know about Harriet Tubman's adult life—how she helped hundreds of slaves escape to freedom along the Underground Railroad. But how know about Harriet Tubman's life as a little African-American girl? This dramatic portrayal will open the eyes of countless young readers and help them to know the little girl who would become one of America's greatest heroines. Full color.