Steve’s Stuff

According to Something Weird Video, the Wizard of Gore himself is back in the director’s chair for a brand new film!

For the first time in horror film history, five bloodthirsty maniacs from the infamous splatter films of HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS team up to butcher and mutilate anyone who stands in their way! Get ready for the super-villain Battle Royale of the century with BACK IN BLOOD and H.G. LEWIS’s GRIM FAIRY TALES! These all-new feature films are based on characters created by legendary horror director Herschell Gordon Lewis, teaming up the infamous homicidal maniacs: Fuad Ramses (Blood Feast), Montag the Magnificent (Wizard of Gore), Adam Sorg (Color Me Blood Red), and Rodney/Granny Pringle (The Gruesome Twosome). They’re back from the grave - together for the first time ever in the same movie! Scheduled Release Date: 2008

Awesome!

Whether you believe “Inland Empire” is a great film filled with mystery, or a meaningless assemblage of unsettling scenes, you can’t deny that it has a great soundtrack. Sound design has become so important to Lynch that all of his films since “Lost Highway” feature a constant extra-diegetic sound source of some sort. In “Lost Highway”, there were obvious musical selections separated by ominous rumblings and barely audible industrial sounds. Now in IE, the distinction between what is “music” in the traditional sense and what is ambient sound is almost totally blurred. Not all music has melody, and not all ambient sound is without melody - even if only in an abstract sense. While I’m disappointed that Angelo Badalamenti didn’t collaborate, Lynch seems to have taken on the task himself with great success.

In many ways, this is an interesting companion to the film. It appears that Lynch created lengthy selections, which he subsequently cut and arranged to work with the editing and flow of the film. Now, we’re able to hear them in their entirety, as Lynch originally conceived them. To me, it’s a fascinating window into his creative mind.

Beyond Lynch’s original material, there are some interesting selections ranging from Beck to Penderecki’s intense modernist works. The big disappointment for me was the curious omission of the music from the burlesque club scene. It was a great subversion of sleazy stripper jazz into something atonal, but still groovy.

Finally, many speculate that a lot of the film is explained in the lyrics of “Polish Poem”, and this is an easy way to hear it. There do seem to be some answers, but as is typical for Lynch, they’re clouded in vague, poetic language and end up raising more questions than they answer.

This is an excellent soundtrack. Even if you were not a fan of the film itself, the music stands on its own. It’s different from the popular “Lost Highway” soundtrack, but I think it’s equally good.

Sweet - I’m going to see Matthew Barney’s “Drawing Restraint 9″ in Kansas City on Friday. I’ll probably have a blog post about it later. I really wish he would release his material on DVDs. I’ll probably have a blog post about that as well.

Check out the link below if you’re interesting in seeing it. It’s playing for at least a week with advance ticket sales. $8.50. Not bad.

http://www.tivolikc.com/

I found this hilarious video on YouTube. It’s basically a fake commentary for the trailer to Matthew Barney’s film “Drawing Restraint 9″. It’s unbelievably funny if you know Barney at all, but it’s still probably pretty hilarious if you don’t. Enjoy.

With the age of the digital upon us, Mulvey takes the opportunity to revisit some previous critiques of cinema concerning the relationship between still photography and film as well as the presence of still images within a film (or motion picture). This topic is worth reassessing because digital media technology allows the spectator a greater degree of control over issues of playback including stopping the film, pausing the film, rewinding and re-watching, and other such techniques. Barthes’ book, Camera Ludica, is critical of the cinema because its images are less focused on one specific moment in time, one specific composition of subjects; and therefore the images don’t have the strong indexical moment of still photography. She wonders if this relatively new ability of the spectator to view motion pictures in various temporalities will reveal any changes since Barthes’ time.

To begin, I feel that Barthes’ critique of the cinematic image may be biased due to his long-standing love of photography. Barthes knows photography, but does he know cinema in the way that he knows photography? Surely many stills from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligary are nearly as effective as the expressionist paints that inspired its distinctive mise-en-scene. Similarly, Carl Th. Dreyer’s absolute mastery of mise-en-scene produces still images that communicate volumes as in The Passion of Joan of Arc or Ordet. His points on the indexical moment are well taken, but I wonder how different the indexical moment of a photographed dancer is from a still image taken from a film of the same dancer.

Although I know that the artist’s intentions are different between still photography and film, I believe that the masters of mise-en-scene always produce images that can function both in motion and still. Furthermore, I believe films, when viewed as still images have another important difference from photography: by looking at subsequent stills, we can see “what happens next”. A great mystery of photographs, especially portraits, is the conditions surrounding their production (e.g. why the Mona Lisa is smiling, what was the morbidly obese transsexual doing prior to his/her arrest when Weegee captured the image on film?). Film can provide a still image, but it can also provide a context, should we choose to be interested. Photographs of figures in motion are interesting in the fact that we can stop time and study them at our leisure, but they’re also limited in the fact that we don’t know what happens after Lois Greenfield’s dancers land, or if they land at all. I should note that this applies strictly to directors who use mise-en-scene effectively. There are plenty of films with a sort of “practical” mise-en-scene where the camera is simply there to record the action without much regard to framing, staging, sets, blocking, and the like.

Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles provides a particularly interesting case. The lack of activity in the frame allows us time to explore the image much in the way we would a still photograph. As we watch Jeanne for over four hours pealing potatoes, cleaning the house, or washing every single dish from supper, we have plenty of time to analyze minute details with only slight variations. Akerman’s film, or in a similar manner, De Sica’s Umberto D, functions almost as photographic portraits—the lack of onscreen activity gives the viewer time to examine the image in detail while the creative mise-en-scene and depth of character gives the viewer something worth looking at.

Mulvey brings up the issue of narrative linearity because narrative films have a certain forward momentum. Bellour makes an interesting point about the manner in which a still photograph within a film can “stop” the forward momentum of the film itself. Though thought provoking, I feel this is a bit short sighted. When we look at a photograph in real life, we don’t have a sense that time has stopped because we are in the act of looking, analyzing, and thinking. When we are presented with a still photograph in a film, we’re still looking, analyzing, and thinking, but there is an additional layer of complexity that Bellour seems content to ignore: namely, the act of looking through another’s eyes. Say there is a photograph of a clown in a film. We’re seeing the clown ourselves, but we’re also seeing the clown through the eyes of a diegetic character whose father was killed by a clown last year. We’re wondering how the character sees it and how they feel. The use of a POV shot requires us to search for clues to answer this: does the character stare for a long duration, is it a quick glance, does the camera move up and down the image as if to suggest the character is searching for something? Because of this, I don’t think a still photograph within a film necessarily has the halting, jarring effect that Bellour claims. Additionally, there is the popular “Ken Burnes Effect” that attempts to show still photographs in artificial motion. Would Bellour also feel this technique is a “jarring” sensation to the spectator?

Finally, to address Mulvey’s idea of the pensive spectator, I agree to the point that digital technology allows the curious cinephile new ways to view experience film, but to use such a loaded word as “fetishistic”, seems unnecessary. Her description of the “fetishistic” spectator seems, to me at least, in line with the work of a film scholar or a connoisseur. Then again, perhaps Roger Ebert’s famous frame-by-frame analyses at the University of Colorado are not entirely for the benefit of the students!

Emerging from Jameson’s dense prose, I find the message: video art provides a “total flow” of meaning (meaning in a very qualified, postmodern sense) where signifiers are constantly in flux, constantly redefined, constantly re-contextualized, and where the only referent possible is that of indisputable historical fact, or in other words, the Lacanian Real. Thus, video is, as Jameson concludes, the ideal medium of transmission of postmodern thought. Over the course of the article, Jameson uses a particular video work, AlienNATION , to demonstrate his points. Jameson refrains from offering any sort of aesthetic judgment, preferring to describe video as a medium, to analyze interesting features, and to explore a variety of interpretive methodologies.

Jameson makes an important phenomenological distinction between video and film because where film (even art film) has a lengthy history of concept and technique, video is (at the time of his essay) slightly over twenty years old and thus doesn’t have the same foundations or expectations.

Although Jameson seems as neutral as possible, he has what appears to be a pessimistic view of the possibilities of postmodern textual manipulation. When he writes, “we are left with that pure and random play of signifiers . . . which no longer produces monumental works of the modernist type but ceaselessly reshuffles the fragments of preexistent texts, the building blocks of older cultural and social production”, he is presenting the situation as if postmodern works are doomed to randomly repeat segments of the past without any sort of intelligent design. While it’s true that, as Derrida shows us, we cannot reasonably assume any sort of logocentricity, if there was no possibility of, say, ironic juxtaposition, there would be no point in making postmodern works—they would just be meaningless jumbles of infinitely meaningful (and thus meaningless) signifiers.

In Intertextual Irony and Levels of Reading, Eco shows how he uses this freedom of signification to generate a surplus of meaning within his literature. Similarly, Tarantino’s cinema is filled with intertextual elements such as the briefcase scene in Pulp Fiction, where the viewer is reminded of the myth of Pandora’s box, the final scene in Repo Man, as well as Raiders of the Lost Arc. The briefcase scene generates at least three specific and purposeful meanings, hardly the random jumble that Jameson describes.

While Jameson may have a dim view of postmodernity in art, he does an excellent job explaining why other forms of interpretation fail to say anything useful about postmodern works. He writes that if the “ephemeral” and “disposable” text is the building block of postmodern art, then there can be little gleaned from an analysis of any one fragment. Similarly, no video work can be viewed in isolation from the whole of the video art world. He goes on to contend that though one may attempt to “sort the material out into thematic blocks and rhythms and repunctuate it with beginnings and endings, with graphs of rising and falling emotivity, climaxes, dead passages, transitions, recapitulations, and the like”, the result will be different upon every viewing.

Insofar as that is a true statement, is it necessarily a positive or negative characteristic of postmodern art? There must be a certain value to a work that allows one to return over and over again for a completely new experience. Again, Jameson language is telling: phrases such as “____ is reduced to” indicate that he doesn’t see this potential for varied readings as a positive characteristic because if the author cannot control the message, there must be no message and therefore no art in creation. I see the potential for multiple and diverse readings as an intriguing characteristic of postmodern art. Furthermore, this whole notion of interpretive impossibility is specious. Again referring to Eco, the author creatively engages multiple levels of signification and though there are always already infinite readings, certain readings make a lot more sense. Even if one cannot definitively state the “correct” reading of a text, one can find a range of readings that generate the most coherent and meaningful interpretation. Jameson is correct to poke fun at the standard interpretive question—“what does it mean?”—because this assumes a single “correct” reading, but just because there is no definitive reading, it doesn’t necessarily mean that there are no readings that are better than others.

The scope of Jameson’s article is, perhaps, its best feature. It’s fascinating how he manages to describe such a wide range of postmodernity in art while talking only about video art. If I take issue with certain points, it doesn’t mean that the article on the whole is flawed. Simply, everyone will approach the concepts of postmodernism from a different perspective and now I’ve presented mine.

Film art and video art - apparent, the moving picture world is not big enough for the both of them. A survey of important studies of motion picture arts finds one excluding the other, as if it did not exist. In it’s 550+ pages David Bordwell’s “Film History” manages to mention seminal video artist, theorist, and aesthetician, Nam June Paik only once.

Similarly, Illuminating Video, a collection of important source readings on video art, fails to mention experimental film makes in its “history”. One article traces technology in the arts starting with the industrial revolution and continuing through still photography to the half-inch portapak video recorders of the sixties, but it completely ignores the rich history of experimental filmmakers such as Maya Deren.

The distinction between narrative and non-narrative is weak because many filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage have no narrative traces while many video artists working in the underground documentary style feature many narrative elements.

Some will also make a distinction between video artists who are seen as more concerned with experimenting with the medium itself (again, Nam June Paik), while filmmakers are more concerned with mise-en-scene and editing. Again, there are sufficient exceptions to those generalizations to make them effectively worthless.

Why is there this divide? Is it simply over the medium and/or production technique? Filmmakers use 35mm stock while video artists use half-inch tape (or miniDV today)? This seems to be a rather arbitrary distinction. What if pianists failed to recognize percussion instruments simply because one sits to play the piano while one stands to play percussion?

Who knows.