Thank you for visiting my blog. I’m a scholar of television, film, and digital media, and the author of CINEMA OF CONFINEMENT (Northwestern University Press) and CAPTURING DIGITAL MEDIA (Bloomsbury Academic). I’ve published a variety of articles on film and television in journals published by Taylor & Francis. I am also a writer of fiction. All of my books can be viewed on www.tomconnellyfiction.com
Here are some random reviews of a few movies I had recently seen.
Collateral, Michael Mann, 2004.
Michael Mann is known for his film noir/gangster films such as Thief and Heat as well as his 1980s postmodern television show Miami Vice. Collateral fits nicely with these clutch of films. The story occurs during one night and is about a taxi driver (Max) who is forced to drive a hit man (Vincent) throughout Los Angeles. The films stars Jamie Foxx (Max) and Tom Cruise (Vincent), in one of his finest performances.
Collateral is shot in high definition, which was kind of big deal when it came out in 2004. Although there were slew of films that had been shot on digital video, this made a splash for its big budget and big stars. Collateral demonstrates that digital video can depict vast landscapes through deep focus photography. This is, in particular, what stands out in Collateral: namely, the film's emphasis on empty spaces of Los Angeles in order to create atmospheric tension. I was reminded or Alex Cox's cult masterpiece Repo Man, where cars traverse lonely highways, bathed in a panoply of washed out neon colors of Los Angeles (see image below). Of course, one of the great filmmakers to depict empty space and loneliness is Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni.
There is also great use of popular music and score in Collateral. Mann is known for his hypnotic and majestic use of the synthesizer. And it all works here. An element that I have been focusing on in my own research is the soundtrack or popular song as narrative digression. We found many moments of musical digressions in Collateral in order to build atmosphere and moods that reflect character interiority. This is a way of moving the narrative without overt causality.
Lastly, the final moments of the film is classic Michael Mann, where Vincent philosophizes the code or life of the gangster. This scene, in particular, calls our spectatorship into question. We begin to question Vincent's motivates as a killing machine--even sort of feel bad for him. It returns us to a question Vincent poses to Max earlier in the film: "Millions of galaxies of hundreds of millions of stars and a
speck on one in a blink...that's us. Lost
in space. The universe don’t care about you. The cop, you, me? Who notices?"
Drunken Angel, Akira Kurosawa, 1948
Drunken Angel is widely known as Kurosawa's first collaboration with Toshiro Mifune, an actor he made many movies with. The film tells the story of gangster, Matsunaga (part of the yakuza), played by Mifune. Matsunaga is diagnosed with tuberculosis by an alcoholic doctor and will die if not treated. The doctor cares about Matsunaga and believes he can both cure his disease and free him from his gangster life. Matsunaga, however, is stuck between these two worlds, uncertain if he can truly escape the yakuza. But does he really have a choice or is it his fate to die? Of course, fate is a central tenet of film noir.
The setting of the town is located near a contaminated lake, possibly the cause of illness among its inhabitants. One of the most striking scenes in the film is Matsunag's ocean dream, where he encounters his own death, filmed hauntingly in slow motion. Kurosawa seems to be channeling German Expressionism in this sequence--especially Mifune's excessive gestures and over the top expressions. One wonders if Ingmar Bergman was influenced by this scene when he shot the fantastic dream/death sequence in Wild Strawberries? This is an extremely fine film made by Kurosawa during the time when U.S. had occupied Japan post WWII. Mifune's performance is outstanding and does a terrific job embodying the character of Matsunaga.
Mother Night, 1996, Directed by Keith Gordon
Mother Night was released during the surge of Independent cinema in the 1990s. This is a gem of a film and surprisingly not mentioned among the great films of the 1990s. Mother Night is a story about Howard W. Campbell Jr. (Nick Nolte), an American Nazi playwright living in New York city. We find out that Campbell was a spy and sent undercover to transmit special codes during his Nazi propaganda speech during his radio program. Only a few people know about Howard. One person in particular was an agent of the U.S. War department, which Howard refers to as his "blue fairy godmother" played by John Goodman. Howard chooses to live in New York City after the war. After meeting his neighbor, George Craft (Alan Alda) things become complicated for Howard, eventually leading to his imprisonment in Israel. The film moves back and forth through time, during Howard being locked up in a jail in Israel (filmed in black and white) and the recounting of his life until his imprisonment.
This is an intentionally slow moving film with fine performance from Nick Nolte, John Goodman and Alan Alda. Like the novel, the film brings forth complex questions of morality, with a bit a black humor.
As a random note, although the film closely follows the book's narrative, it does not
attempt to match the film's aesthetics to Vonnegut's
fragmented writing style. I always felt there is a bit of the absurd
in Vonnegut's brilliant prose. And I believe there has only been one
filmmaker who captured the absurdity that Vonnegut depicts
in his works - and that is George Roy Hill and he is dead. For this
reason, I also highly recommend Slaughter House Five - one of Hill's best films alongside The World According to Garp.
I wanted to give a shout out and support to my friends who recently released music this past summer, including myself. Overall, I was blown away by the music on these three releases. The sound quality and musicianship are all excellent here.
First up is my friend Anthony's band Edgemont, from Minneapolis, who released their EP entitled Like It Is.
Anthony and I have been friends for a long time and have shared tons of music that we have written over the years. I was very excited to hear about the release of his EP, which was a long time in the making. There are many musical influence the make up the seven songs of Like It Is. There are traces of Coldplay, Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam. What I really enjoyed about these seven songs is the hypnotic sound and poetic lyrics. My favorite tracks are "Uncomfortable Comfort" and "Things I've Known."
Like Anthony, Erik and I have been good friends for a long time. We were both drummers and played in hardcore bands in high school. Erik and I use to share my drum set and played in a band together called Harsh Reality..
I just downloaded Lipstick and Cigarettes' newrelease entitled About Last Night. There are so many styles happening in these songs. The Killers mixed with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Interpol and a spice of Goth. I love the 1980s pop sound, especially the Ric Ocasek influenced vocals. Stand-out tracks are "About Last Night" and "Alibi." I also highly recommend their first EP self entitled Lipstick and Cigarettes.
Last is my friend Dan's band Fear Report. Dan and I met in film school on Long Island. Dan runs a great website called IndieTalk. He also wrote and directed an excellent short film called To Skin a Cat - shot on beautiful black and white film. So one day Dan tells me he started a band. I never knew Dan had the chops for singing!
I highly recommend his new album Pandemic. These 13 songs encompass a range of styles - Chevelle, Stone Temple Pilots, Cold, and Faith No More. There's even a flavor of punk thrown in. I really enjoyed the tracks "Wasting" and "5 Dirty Cents" - overall, a great batch and diversity of songs on Pandemic.
Edgemont, Lipstick and Cigarettes and Fear Report are all available for purchase on Itunes. And visit their websites for shows and updates. I love that independent bands use the Internet as a source to circulate and promote their music independently. This is not to suggest that the Internet is solely responsible for their music - it just makes it easier to share and transmit their music.
But getting reviews and comments can be challenging for independent artists. So I hope I can help support them with this posting. Congrats to my friends for continuing to write and record great music.
For the past year and a half, I have been independently selling my book as both e-book and book format. I have been exploring different ways to promote my book and thought: why not make a trailer? I recently saw a documentary on The Who's Quadrophenia (one of my favorite albums) and was inspired by the photos in the CD booklet (taken from the album).
The photos narrate the experiences of Mod youth Jimmy in 1964. The images reflect the ephemeral and fleeting nature of Jimmy's memories.
The photo below of Jimmy and The Who is one of the most striking images of the story. To the left, The Who leaves the Hammersmith Odeon during the present time (1973); to the right, Jimmy (1964) watches The Who. As pointed out in the recent documentary on Quadrophenia, the space between these two planes of action mark a gap of time. Jimmy, in a sense, is looking into the future and angry about that The Who as big arena rockers, which is depicted in the song The Punk and the Godfather.
Looking to Quadrophenia for inspiration made me think about the significance of album artwork and its combination with music (also see my posting on Archibald Motley and Jazz). The album's artwork is something to study as one listens - a fusion of image and sound.In addition, albums can evoke memories of the listener - this is something I tried to depict in The Postcard when James buy his first Iron Maiden album. Also, see my friend's YouTube postings about his experiences on collecting vinyls.
The Quadrophenia photos gave me the
inspiration to make the trailer for my book. I found this to be a great experience in
terms of trying to capture the mood and feeling of the narrative. More so, it made think about the importance of music and album artwork, and how CD and MP3s have changed this relationship.
Its been almost twenty years since I left All Out War. Out of nowhere, I found out that a small record label called Organized Crime Records re-released AOW's first album "Truth in the Age of Lies." And, to my surprise, our first demo "Sum of All Fears," recorded in the summer of 1992, is included with the re-release as bonus tracks. Also available is a very cool limited 10 inch record of the demo.
All Out War was influenced by both hardcore and thrash bands of the 1980s. Back then, fusing these musical styles was something quite new, which only a hand full bands attempted. My memories of recording "Sum of All Fears" was hot, sweaty, and brutal. A garage converted into a studio in Garfield, NJ, all five us packed inside and everything had to happen in one
shot. No digital machines for us! If you made a mistake, missed a cue...start over. My only regret was that we
did not record the original version of "Witness The End." We had other songs written during that period as well, including an aborted "Sum of All Fears" which we played a few times in the Hudson Valley in 1992. One memorable show was at a pizzeria in a mall in Wappingers Falls that booked local bands at night...that's upstate, NY for ya! I also posted some video clips on YouTube from a show we played in Albany, NY in 1993 - sorry for the sound quality.
"Destined to Burn," "Struggle Within," "Fall From Grace," "Stuck Inside," and "Day of Judgement," these five songs are the roots of All Out War. The only one to go through significant changes was "Stuck Inside."I can only speak to this period of time since I had the left the band at the end of the summer of 1993. And there isn't really much I can add to what Mike already wrote on the sleeve for the 10 inch. One thing I can state is that I believe that our identity was solidified in the extremely slow and grinding riff in "Destined to Burn" that opens the demo. Hardcore bands often started with fast riffs, we took a different road that is still being explored by the band twenty years later....
A recurring theme of the horror/sci-fi film genre is the figure of the old and wise character who is often performed by the aging star actor. This character is typically a doctor or scientist, and holds knowledge of the monster, alien, and/or of character's superpowers. These characters are often highly educated, speak very intelligently, dress professionally, and have a calming presence for spectators. They often arrive in the narrative with pivotal information that motivates and drives the plot forward. Consider the movie Them!(1954) one of the first atomic-age monster films, which casts aging star Edmund Gwenn as Doctor Harold Medford, an entomologist, who discovers that the mutant ants are powerless without their antennae. Even though the scientific discourse in the film seems be a bit obvious, the knowledge of the mutant has to pass through Medford as the figure of knowledge to legitimatize it's narrative exposition.
In the 1970s and 1980s, there seemed to be a plethora of horror/sci-fi films with the aging star as the figure of knowledge and reason. For example, John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) starred Donald Pleasence as Dr. Samuel Loomis, Michael Myers' psychiatrist. It is Dr. Loomis who knows Michael's condition and intentions that he will kill his sister and believes he is the only one knows how to stop him.
In Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980), it is the Overlook Hotel's chef, Dick Hallorann (played by Scatman Crothers), who discloses to Danny's that they both have the gift of "shining," the power to telepathically read each others thoughts as well as seeing premonitions. In this case, Hallorann is not a scientist or doctor, but the figure who has a direct pipeline to the Overlook hotel's past.
In David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone (1983), Herbert Lomplays neurologist Dr. Sam Weizak as the figure of the older erudite man who provides knowledge to viewers about Johnny Smith's (Christopher Walken) power of seeing a person's future through physical contact.
As a side note: The Dead Zone has a fantastic and creepy opening credit sequence where the lettering of the title's typography slowly appears on the screen over images of the town of Castle Rock, Maine. Here the title sequence emphasize the letters' negative space, which reflects the concept of "the dead zone," a void in the future that Johnny cannot predict-such as the ending of the film. We also find the casting of the aging actor as the conveyer of knowledge in fantasy/science fiction films. Most famous is the casting of Sir Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan "Ben" Kenobi in Star Wars (1977). Ben plays the figure of the aging Jedi Knight who explains to young Luke about Darth Vader and the Clone Wars.
Even the political sci-fi thriller Children of Men (2006) casts Michael Caineas an aging hippie cartoonist, Jasper Palmer. Palmer as the conveyer of knowledge and comic relief helps propose the plan for Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) and Theo Faron's (Clive Barker) escape.
As such, the icon of the aging star plays an important function in the sci-fi, fantasy, and horror genres as the communicator of knowledge, wisdom and reason.
The role of the aging star actor also raises the question of science fiction and horror films as occupying a B-film status. Certainly many sci-fi, superhero and horror films are produced with high quality, especially given the power of today's special effects. And many of these fables and story worlds are well written, and inform us about our own experiences of everyday life on planet earth.
But given that the overall body of work of these older actors is not often associated with fantasy and horror films suggests how the presence of an aging star can help legitimize a film's exploration of topics such as mutant bugs, telepathy, monsters, and other forces beyond the everyday world.
This paper will be presented at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference on Sunday, March 13 at 8:00am in New Orleans Feel free to leave comments or post questions.
As early cinema developed out of the period of the actuality film and cinema of attractions, and into a narrator system linked to the emerging Hollywood studio, we begin to see the structuring and standardization of filmic space and temporality. This unification of cinematic time and space, according to the research done by Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson came about through the melding of various modes of practices such as division of labor and agreed upon set of stylistic norms on how movies should properly tell a story. In their research, shot duration, in particular, plays an important role in sustaining the realist illusion of narrative time and space. Bordwell et al. note that the majority of Hollywood films (during the classical period) did not exploit short or long takes as a means of narration in order to prevent viewer from becoming aware of the film’s construction of time and space.
But if the management of shot length is to prevent viewers from becoming aware of the apparatuses that create a film’s virtual world, how do we account for the long take that evokes a sense of speed and can even further the experience of narrative immersion? Using the long take as a form of speed, I argue that there is no necessary correspondence or a strict one to one relationship between shot duration, viewership and the concealment of the construction of filmic time and space. This is not to suggest that long takes are not used to disrupt or engage with temporal and spatial continuity in order to evoke perceptions of slowness or contemplation. This style of filmmaking is evident in the works of Gus Van Sant, Bela Tarr and Michelangelo Antonioni, who employ long takes as a means to create a cinema of duration and stillness alternative to traditional narratives.
What I am arguing is that the economic and/or technological mode of production cannot be the single determinant in how meaning is produced from a cultural artifact such as cinema. As I hope to show in the examples that follow, these filmmakers take technology into their own hands and re-purpose it to meet their artistic vision. I add that the negotiation of the elements which create a film’s story world (such as shot duration) can potentially have a strong impact on a film’s rhythm and speed and overall narrative experience.
The first half of this presentation, I will show some examples of the long take as a form of speed and how these directors and their production crew negotiate and push the limits of the latest technologies to meet their visions. And the second half of the presentation will tackle the theoretical question of shot duration in regards to defining the essence of cinema.
I would like to begin with an example from Joseph H. Lewis’ crime drama, Gun Crazy (1950). The long take we are seeing involves a bank heist, which takes place from the point of view of outlaw and thieves Bart and Annie played by John Dall and Peggy Cummins. To create the sequence, Lewis used a stretch Cadillac and removed all the seats to fit the camera operator and a bare bones production crew. Instead of following the script, Lewis had both actors Dahl and Cummins improvise their dialogue to enhance the suspense and realism of the scene.
Lewis stated that the scene was so real that “Off-screen there were people that yelled, ‘They held up the bank, they held up the bank,’ … none of the bystanders [of the town] knew what we were doing. We had no extras except the people the policeman directed. Everything—cars, people—was there on the street” (47). Thus, the Hampton robbery scene illustrates that the long take not only can be re-purposed to create a feeling of immersion and suspense, but also can invoke a sense of speed and velocity.
The desire to move the camera and to create a dynamic cinematic space can be traced back to the silent film period. In Lotte Eisner’s book on German film director and expressionistic pioneer F.W. Murnau, she refers to notes typed by Murnau in which he expresses a wish from “Father Christmas [to create] a camera that can move freely in space” (84).Murnau’s wish would practically come true in the 1970s with Garrett Brown’s invention of the steadicam. Handheld photography had already established itself as a style employed by narrative filmmakers and documentarians. But the Steadicam not only can track its subject with fluidity, but it also run within the profilmic space without the camera obtrusively bouncing up and down. Let’s take a look at the Steadicam in action.
Here, we see Brown sitting in the wheelchair with the steadicam on the set of Stanley Kubrick’sThe Shining (1980). Similarly, as we saw with Lewis’ rigging of the stretched Cadillac in Gun Crazy, the wheelchair has been turned into a movable camera support. Even though the Steadicam offered more flexibility in moving the camera through pro-filmic space, Kubrick and his production crew still had to pool their resources in order to build a moving device to capture his vision of fluid moving images in the labyrinth hallways of the Overlook hotel.
Today, with the emergence of state of the art simulation technologies, films now can incorporate many layers blended together within the frame such as virtual actors, crowd sequences and matted paintings with live action recording. More so, as Lev Manovich notes, “Digital compositing does represent a new step in the history of visual simulation because it allows the creation of moving images of non-existent worlds” (153 Authors emphasis).
Thus, new digital technologies not only allow one to create new and imaginative virtual worlds, but also can be mobile within those specific dimensions. Let’s take a look at the making of the long shot from Steven Spielberg’sWar of the Worlds (2005).
The use of CGI effects become so life-like that the long take in this scene not only gives a sense of urgency and speed, but shows how these special effects conceals the film’s apparatus. This is what Manovich refers to as synthetic realism through the creation of synthetic 3-D images. In the example of the long take in War of the Worlds, special effects are blended with live action to continue Hollywood’s long tradition of narrative realism.
Conversely, the impression of slowness or fastness does not always have to entail long takes. Films that use the standard methods of editing can also disrupt the transparency and unity of cinematic time and space through the elements within the frame itself.
The next example is from David Lynch’sTwin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992). What we are seeing is the pink room sequence where Laura Palmer and Donna Hayward go out with Jacques Renault and his buddies to party.
To create this effect of an alternate plane of reality, Lynch architects a dreamlike atmosphere using loud trance-like music and the disorientating effect of a strobe light. To further the feeling of drug-induced and surreal state of mind, the characters’ lethargic body gestures and delayed dialogue deliberately slow down the pace of the scene, thus creating a meditative or even out of body experience as if time no longer exists. Moreover, the scene itself goes on for a long period of time, which alters the pace of the entire film. This sequence is an example of a scene that does not employ overtly long takes, but is still able to slowdown the time and speed of the film by using the elements within the frame itself.
As stated earlier, if the management of shot length is to prevent viewers from becoming aware of the construction of filmic time and space, how do we account for the long take that evokes a sense of speed? Moreover, how do we account for films that employ normal shot duration that derail cinematic time and space such as Lynch’s Twin Peaks?
As it is known in classical film theory, one of the central debates in regards to editing versus shot duration is Sergei Eisenstein’s formalist theory of dialectical montage, and Andre Bazin’s accounts of cinematic realism and mise en scene. These two canonical arguments address the question on how is meaning generated in cinema. Is it editing or is it mise en scene that names cinema’s essence? Although Eisenstein and Bazin’s theories make up a major component of classical film theory, the question of film’s essence or ontology continues to be addressed today.
For example, Lev Manovich considers Eisenstein’s technique of montage used in simulation technologies. Eisenstein’s theory of dialectical montage is the collision of shots and the image it creates within the viewer’s mind. For example, the juxtaposition of cattle being slaughtered and the rounding up of factory workers at the end of Strike and its metaphor or illusion to capitalism. Manovich, however, notes that the virtual image is there for us on the screen, but the modes of production that create the reality (that is, the processes behind the scenes) are synthesizes via the computer to offer us the illusion of a seamless reality. In other words, simulation technology arranges the components within a shot and renders them in montage like fashion to create a transparent film image as we saw in the long take in War of the Worlds.
D. N. Rodowick makes a similar argument in his critique of Russian Ark (2002), a film shot in one long take using digital technologies. He notes “The key to resolving the discrepancy between Russian Ark’s self-presentation and its ontological expression as digital cinema is to understand that it is a montage work, no less complex in this respect than Sergei Eisenstein’s 1927 film October” (165).
Rodowick notes a contradiction in Russian Ark’s (2002) experiment of the long take because it relies primarily on many digital events which he notes are digital capturing, synthesis and compositing. In other words, the long take in Russian Arc is rendered mathematically via the binary code of computer language; where as traditional photography capture light as it comes through the lens and penetrates the emulsion of the film, leaving a physical trace of reality.
What I think it is important to point out in these theoretical debates in regards to editing and shot duration is not who has the stronger or better argument in terms of defining the essence of cinema, but the tension that has emerged in regards to its very definition. Here, I draw upon Stuart Hall’s model of articulation which entails how the production and consumption of cultural objects are represented and negotiated within the lived practices of every day life.
Articulation is an operation of meaning-making that does not have any necessary correspondence or a direct one to one relationship between social practices and processes of production. For Hall, articulation is not universally fixed across various discourses. Therefore texts can become a site of a struggle where groups contest and can potentially transform a leading cultural force or dominant ideology.
For example, we can see how the long take creates a cinema of duration, engaging with filmic time and space counter to the dominant mode of classical narration. And, in other instances, the long take is articulated as a form a speed and velocity that attempts to do what Jean Mitry phrases as “forgetting of the frame.”
But Hall points out that articulation cannot all simply be differences or free floating. We need a system or “fixing” to connect to grids of knowledge. What is contingent is how each prior set of signifying practices can influence the process of encoding and decoding of a text such as cinema or television. Using Hall’s notion of articulation, we can conclude that there is no necessary belongingness or a fixed universal essence in regards to shot duration and editing. But what is consistent is the tension that emerges in its very definition. And that the struggle in defining cinema’s essence will generate different interpretations as in the case of using digital technologies versus traditional film photography.
To conclude, as I hope to have shown, the ordering of cinematic time and space is not directly tied to a hegemonic mode of production, or linked to a grand essence of cinema. In these examples, we have seen how artists mold the current film technologies to meet their story visions. And we have also seen how the orchestration of the elements within the frame can distort normal pictorial time and space as was the case with Lynch’s Fire Walk with Me. Thus, these examples provide a glimpse into how much information is at work in creating a film’s story world (whether its traditional film photography or digital technologies), and how they can potentially create impressions of speed in relation to the construction of cinematic time and space.
I found some short essays I wrote for a graduate Jazz course I took at The University of Vermont - taught by jazz scholar John Gennari. Since I have not posted anything to my blog in a while, I thought this would be fun.
Archibald F. Motley’s painting After Fiesta, Remorse, Siesta, is a beautiful visualization of jazz.
It is a painting that reflects jazz culture while speaking to the lonely figure. At first glance, the blue tones empower the entire painting, creating a feeling of melancholy. But the eye then notices pink/reddish tones, such as the naked woman’s reddish colored jacket resting on a chair, and her red shoes on the floor.
Motley uses dichotomies within this painting to create an ethereal feeling For example, he contrasts the woman at the piano with a portrait on the wall of a matador fighting a bull—suggesting a masculine/feminine dichotomy. In the background, a couple is embracing by a street lamp. In the far corners of the lamp post are the dangerous cactus and the soothing palm tree, adding to the abstract and surreal feeling of the image.
The crowding of images in the foreground while leaving open space in the background is another motif of Motley’s work. Motley positions the patrons who are having a good time in the foreground, very close to one another. The lonely or aloof figures are positioned in the background.
For example, in the painting Barbecue, the patrons are having a good time at the tables in the foreground. In the background, the space is more open and only a few patrons dance. Also framed near the fence in the far distance is a man, alone, looking down with his hands in his pocket.
Motley positions the aloof characters so it takes time for the eye to recognize them in the painting's space. Because the eye is not quickly drawn to the lonely man in Barbecue, the painting suggests that the patrons do not recognize this man. The man is not only absent from their enjoyment, but seems to be unstuck from the painting's time and space.
Similarly, in After Fiesta, Remorse, Siesta unexpectedly to the right center is a man asleep with his head in his hands. Once the eye catches this man, one has to rethink the time and space of the painting. Did this mysterious man’s attempt to meet a woman prove futile? Or are what we are seeing in the painting is his actual dream?
