Just a Kiss From Your Lips And I'm Gone

The kiss of death.  It's a concept that has been done to...well, to death.  There isn't a whole lot of kissing in A Single Man, by my count there are 4 significant ones.  Ones that I can remember anyway, I might have missed George fooling with the lips of his young student, but hey.  The four that stuck out to me were the one pictured above between George and Jim, when they were both alive, the two kisses after death from fantasy George and ghost Jim at the beginning and end of the film and finally the awkward kiss between George and his lady friend.

What drew me to the kisses was how the movie is open and ended, (or sealed, as it were) with a kiss.  The first was from George to his then dead partner Jim in a dreamscape.  The second was from Jim to his now recently heart attacked George.  I think what this film spoke to me on was the idea of how kisses tend to be periods on the end of moments.  You kiss someone before the go to work, before they leave for war, before they leave your life forever.  You also kiss to begin things, in some countries it's a common greeting.  In our culture it's how we finally begin marriage.  For many, you're not really "in a relationship" until you kiss them.

The kiss between George and Jim in the middle is the only one featured when the two of them are still alive, and in a lot of ways it seems kind of meaningless.  To me this made me think of how we tend to live in a world of extremes, it's all about the first impressions you made and how you spent your last day, your first and your last kiss.  All the stuff in the middle of that doesn't actually count of mean anything.

The kiss between George and his female friend was and exhibition on how one may try to futilely start a relationship with actions typically reserved for people who actually want to be in them.  She sees the kiss as this beginning point like so many of us do, but unfortunately just because it always begins that way doesn't mean that simply doing it will bring about that moment and those feelings.  It was her first with him, but because of the circumstances surrounding it, it was also her last.

Melancholia and all you can Do with it.

Do Theory.
...
....
.....DON'T MIND IF I DO!
Ack.

Um.

I suppose for simplicity’s sake, I’ll talk about one of the scenes I mentioned in my screening notes. 

In the first ten minutes of the movie, there’s this scene with the newly married couple are trying to get this stretch limo down a winding and narrow road.  The driver himself can’t seem to do it, which leads to two passengers to take a shot at doing it themselves. 

To me, when I look at it through the lens of the impending death of cinema, I see it as a commentary on the film community as a whole throughout history.  Film would come to these difficulties over time, these winds in the road as film evolved and changed, thus changing what the cinema was offering and what brought people in.  And like with any invention, until something replaces it, it’s a matter of trying to out do what came before.  In this case, Justine and her husband were other film makers, thinking they had the better way to go about it.  Meanwhile, the driver and the other spouse stood on the sidelines and playful taunted the driving person.  It’s like how different film makers think they have found the thing to really draw people in and make money in the cinema.  For awhile it was variety film, then action films in the ninties, then super hero films were big until Mel Gibson struck while the religious iron was hot and beat Spiderman.  Then we moved onto having more computer generated film, and now 3-d film.  I think that the limo’s jerking and uncomfortable movement is a great example of where the cinema is going, as in it’s a slow movement where little positive progress is made each time.  And then, finally, when someone does get it right and draw people in, i.e. when Justine finally gets the limo here it needs to be, a planet collides with you the next day and the limo is lost.  Thinking of the scene in terms of the whole film really drive home the futility of these shiny new things in film trying to draw people into the cinema, when in reality it is destined for doom.

Is A Knife All I Am To You? -- The case for Idealism with Psycho

Fun fact: aside from that one scene in Psycho with Marion getting stabbed to death in a shower, there are about another 100 minutes of film?  It is my assertion that ideological theory is the most effective, as well as the most important way to analyze and evaluate Hitchcock's Psycho.

Claim 1: Film is more than just what it shows us.  We can't limit ourselves to just what is presented to us as we would with formalism, our thoughts, feelings and outside worlds are relevant to us and the way we perceive and interpret art.  

Support-references/quotes from Eisenstein.  

Claim 2: Ideological theory is as accessible as you want it to be.

Support- The claim that ideological theory is inaccessible is nothing short of irresponsible.  There isn't anything wrong with holding ourselves, as an art consuming community, to a higher standard of understanding.  Escapism is pointless in the grand narrative of our history and analyzing scenes in isolation is a disservice to the entirety of the film and all it could mean.  As long as the person postulating the ideas is clear and sound in their analysis, it should be just as accessible as any other way of speaking on film.

Claim 3: Objectivity is more or less pointless.

Support- In my own travels, I have been to a number of open mics and talent shows.  The open mics that are just about expression are always more profound than talent shows.  By that token, it shouldn't matter if a music cue here or a slash cut there was intended to convey something in particular or is it was "successful" or not.  It shouldn't matter if a film is "good" or not.  It should be about what we take from it as it relates to ourselves and our society.  

Grapes of Wrath: Screening Notes!

Still gotta figure out how to fix this silly blog thing.

The way film characterizes things and people is unlike what any other medium can provide.  That is chiefly do to the presence of sight and sound.  Photography, there is no sound, and books don't have anything but the author's word for it.

A great example of this can be seen in any scene involving large machinery.  The tractors are characterized as these ominous harbingers of despair, here to knock over your home and take away everything you ever had.  The tractors were overlayed with other tractor footage, eliciting a feeling of desperation and fear. 

The next scene with a tractor is the man’s flash back of his house being knocked down, where they close up in on the tractor as it crashes through the man’s fence like a monster before knocking over their flimsy house.  Film can also turn away just as it happens, in the way you would when you say “I can’t watch” when something particularly inhumane is about to happen. 

The scene is also a flashback that transitions back to the real world, giving a feel of the supernatural, even though this is a film that is too early to have crazy special effects.

Cars are also vessels of escape.  It appears that way due to the way they're filmed.  The tractors are always rolling towards you, and cars, with the exception of a few scenes, are usually riding away from the camera.

Woody Reality

I think Woody Allen is making meta-meta commentary on the film industry as a whole, not just from the perspectives of producers, but of even the film going populous.  I don't think Woody Allen was trying to make a banal movie, and I don't think he thinks movies are meant for people to just walk into and "be entertained" by.  If he did that and thought that, then he would have just made a banal "entertaining" movie and finally found some actual, lasting, tangible mainstream success.

The scene in question I chose to examine shows our main character played by Owen Wilson puttering through an art gallery with his wife-to-be, and the man she's been crushing on for years.  This is a man that appears to have a very developed mind and knowledge of the art culture and history.  His words are dogma.  His follower will stand and listen to this man without questioning him once.  This man is the person who hopelessly tries to make the world around him seem three dimensional for nothing but his own benefit, which at first seems like a commentary on the pointlessness of analyzing film, until it is taken into the account that this man is a narrative antagonist.

Owen Wilson tries to pop up with a differing opinion and gets shushed, again, demonstrating the reaction of many when one stands against someone who's opinion is already readily accepted.

Owen Wilson's character tries once more and succeeds in stating his point, stating items that aren't accepted as facts because he has an insight to the happenings that nobody else does.  In this case, Owen Wilson could simply be a rival person with an opinion, but I think it's Woody Allen speaking from his perspective as a creator to make a meta-metaobservation.  He has insight to the intentions and meanings of his own film that we cannot hope to know, like Owen Wilson with his travels to the past, but like Owen, even if Woody presented them, it would not be able to invalidate other analysis that were already presented.  All he could do is come out, state his point, put his hands in his pockets and walk away, like in the scene.  The antagonist character isn't going to stop being a pedantic douche, the film industry isn't going to change.  He knows what he means, and people are going to talk about it, and the very fact that somebody talks about it is proof enough that film isn't just about walking in an being entertained by something mindless.

The illusion is not embraced so much as it is accepted as an inevitability.  But it's okay because there will always be people standing in front of the art and commenting on it, so even if it's Tyler Perry's Perpetuating African American Stereotypes or one of local Gainesville legend Tom Miller's butt print paintings, where the meaning is meant to be absent, people will apply meaning to it anyway.  The illusion only stays because analysis is more readily acceptable if a film is meant to seem like something deeper, where this movie is not meant to be that.  It's meant to be dug into and have meaning affixed to it.

Midnight In Paris

I viewed the film Midnight In Paris with the mindset of thinking about the things that only film can provide us.

-Films can roll through the items in a room or scene in en route to showing what the main character is looking at.  It can show all the things in the room, in this case the party goers, food and furniture.  Pictures and paintings can only cover a single scene at a single moment in time, but film can cover all that’s happening in the room, in moving time even, documenting change as it happens. 

-Film can show past events and people living and happening in front of us in the present.  This film features many characters that have been long since dead that are “existing” within the “real world” that Owen Wilson’s character lives in.  photographs and paintings can depict characters or locations that either have never existed in our world or no longer exist in our world, but film can present them in juxtaposition with characters perceived to be living in our own time, and present them as living breathing people and environments.  Which is actually pretty cool when you think about it, because you can do whatever you want then and have Abe Lincoln fight Hitler or something.

Masculin, Feminin

Notes from my handy-dandy notebook!  This will be on how the film breaks conventional rules.

-The camera doesn't cut to each character as they speak.  There is no shot/reverse shot, the camera merely stayed on one of the characters while they spoke to another off screen character.

-Some of the editing doesn't appear to make continuity clear, and rather just make it confusing.  The shots also don't appear to have any relevance to the narrative.

-There are rarely establishing shots, in favor of slides presenting the scene number as well as a few printed words.  Usually we are thrown into a setting just before a scene begins.

-Music isn't used to evoke reactions of the audience, but apparently just to fill dead air, as the music track stops when dialogue or other sounds interrupt it.

-Parallel editing is used, but isn't entirely clear that it is being used during the movie theatre seen.

That's about it!  Otherwise, it was quite the trip!