We're Breaking Up

Film theory has shifted in the last 30 years as it's matured, moving from primarily text-based analysis (what did John Ford really mean?) to unpacking more psychological gender and racial-imperialistic tendencies in certain modes of production (what do John Ford films say about the studios he worked for?). By the '80s theorists are bringing up Lacan and semiological post- modern readings (what is the audience bringing to the text, regardless of what the studios or John Ford intended?)

Now the breaking wave of film analysis seems to be moving towards Reception Studies. Academics are analyzing the ephemera and messages, covert and overt, surrounding a text, a film, a moving image "event" that encode and inflect its address to the audiences. The extra-textural, if you will. Stay with me. Cable specials and star power influence and infect how we like or disregard a film's intentions; what culturally surrounds the experience influences the ways audiences receive and perceive the work. It's impossible for the studios to control and sometimes it's simply hype. (A certain blue cat movie comes to mind.)

"Blade Runner" in 1982 doesn't (and didn't) work after "Star Wars" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark." But our relationship to Harrison Ford changes after "Presumed Innocent" and "The Fugitive," and 25 years later, even if you haven't seen those, "Blade Runner" is an "instant classic." Hitchcock's "Frenzy" turns our stomachs in 1972 with its droll sick sense of humor, 12 years after "Psycho" (12 whole years!), but when his entire career is all crushed to a convenient weekend of renting on demand and random access, suddenly themes and touches resonate brilliantly all the way back to the original "The Man Who Knew Too Much," through to "Vertigo," as early as "Blackmail" and up again to "Marnie," which may not be so bad after all.

Bowie's "Station to Station" is less discordant and incomplete when it's fit so smoothly between "Young Americans" and "Low," pointing the way to Berlin and later to shiny-chrome disco.

All these attempts by artists to try something new meet with derision and confusion, only to become clearly the first steps in strong and appropriate paths with hindsight of the longer more historical view. "The Cable Guy" still doesn't get a pass.

How does the theatrical experience influence how we appreciate films? It starts with a trailer we see 4 months or so before the movie opens that raises our awareness, in the very theatre where we will eventually see it a season later. We finally go on opening weekend, or at least in the couple weeks before it leaves, firmly in the time continuum and cultural window in which it is born and lives with an audience, all like-minded and motivated to go pay money to see it. The long lines outside "Matrix Reloaded" inflects our experience inside differently than the half-empty "Matrix Revolutions" 6 months later.

Something is irrevocably lost when we chose to watch films at home, later, by ourselves or on our electronic devices. Without the lines, without the need to see it on opening weekend, we lose not only our personal connection to the excitement of the event status of a moving image presentation, we don't get it.

As films become personal, individualized, and casual, we become unmoved by their circumstance. We don't have a community. We don't fall in love with the text because it's a good date and a good night out. The upside is that any analysis of a film must return, by default, to purely textual. But it also strips it of cultural context and important situational meaning.

The New and Improved French Connection

Robert Harris (yes, that Robert Harris) was involved in the new restoration of William Friedkin's "The French Connection" early last year, and it's worthy of revisiting (Friedkin is doing a Coppola - since he isn't producing mainstream films on note anymore (I haven't seen "Bug," so I'm reserving judgment), he might as well restore the old triumphs). And perhaps to be expected, there are concerns about the results of the updating, seen here on the Home Theatre Forum website (here).

Apparently they've moved from the original 1971 film stock color palette and "reimagined" the look, making it more in tune with a '40s Technicolor look, "denaturalizing" the original and sharpening the contrast. While not in the ballpark of Lucas changing plotpoints in his reissues of "Star Wars," this again brings up the responsibility of a filmmaker working in the 21st-century blu-ray aesthetic.

Mr. Harris himself notes that it is not the film that won the Oscar 35 years ago anymore. It's now a 2009 version of a '40s look applied to a '70s film's version of the '40s. No iteration of which is authentically, intentionally or completely of its time.

I was happy to have seen this film in its new digital glory, but will no doubt never have a chance to see the "original" '70s version again.
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An earlier version of this post originally appeared on the AMIA UCLA Student Chapter blog in 2009.

Blue Cat People

Gaspar Noe is now on record as saying he thinks "Avatar" is amazing (here). I think he used the term "cat's pajamas." Manohla Dargis muses that the success of the film highlights the very nature of film and filmgoing changing before our eyes (here). Like "Titanic," "Avatar" arrived surrounded by clouds of doubt, negative buzz and poisonous PR right up to the time that it became the 2nd-highest grossing film IN THE WORLD - sometime last week.

Whether it costs $220 million or $600 million, it's a hit, and indeed will change the face of cinema. The anxiety over the coming digital revolution has been assuaged for the moment (documented earlier last year).

Hollywood has always been a popularity contest. Incredible three dimensional hi-jinx and digital delivery have been lauded as the lifesaver for theatrical film exhibition ever since about 70% of the $90 million gross of "Meet The Robinsons" (2007) came from the handful of 3-D screens it continued to play at throughout the summer with no other digital or 3-d competition and the worst reviews since "Chicken Little." Filmmakers from Robert Zemeckis to Pete Docter didn't merely jump on the bandwagon. They were pushed.

2009 has posted the largest box office numbers in years, not because of rising prices (which is the usual reason why annual box office goes up) but because actual attendance actually increased. In the failing economy and double-digit falls in DVD sales and record levels of unemployment, with echoes to the depression in the '30s, people are going to movies again, if only to pack up their troubles and brother can you spare a dime. Never mind that much of these numbers are related to films as "The Blind Side" and "The Hangover," two conservative and pretty old-school films that you could name (which arguably "Avatar" is as well).

What if "Avatar" had fallen onto its blue face? Hollywood would have understood that and actually been a little okay with it, and continued constricting and moaning, waiting for the new savior of the industry to be born or some unexpected film or trend or angle to present itself as a pleasant and exploitable surprise. And Cameron would maybe have been put in his place. But this isn't a Leno-at-10 situation. The studios and pundits have put so many eggs into the "Avatar" basket that its success is an uneasy relief. As well as a mixed signal.

So now, 3-D, and Imax, and science fiction, and even Robert Downey Jr. are going to inflect many films put into development this year. People are going to movie theatres again - because they have to. Who wants to see "Avatar" on their iPod? Except a dozen companies have now announced technologies to put 3-D into your home at the recent Electronic Expo (link) and soon you won't have to go to the Arclight after all to see it as if it were happening in front of you.

Millions of dollars will be spent on the infrastructure, new televisions, glasses and devices to stream proprietary content. All to get your eyeballs on their intellectual packages. Hollywood is gripped with a new hope, and a new panic, and finally something new to get to work on. This new technology will throw out 100 years of standards and the theatrical experience, newly reinvigorated, will speed faster to its inevitable decline. Companies will invest in the wrong standards, go bankrupt, won't have content even if their system does work, and then....

...some little $15k film will surprise everyone and do a ton of business. Like "Easy Rider" in 1969, which was inadvertently ruinous to the studios in the '70s when they threw all kinds of money at the youth movement, spending high on low culture, throwing out the old rules and selling the libraries and handing the keys to the kingdom to young turks who wanted to - and almost did - tear the edifice down, not understanding what they were investing in or where the future lied (link).

Recapturing the "Blair Witch" or "Easy Rider" or "Paranormal" magic in a bottle is hard. It's a lot easier to merely spend tons of money on giant loud blue cat people movies. "Avatar" may ruin the business after all, not because to replicate it comes at a dear cost, but because it was so damn successful and Hollywood is scared enough to try.

The Comfort of the Cut

As a new generation of horror films change what we scream and cower at - or at least, get nervous watching on our couch at home - the techniques horror films employ have to adapt as well.

We are increasingly used to streaming and handmade handheld filmmaking on YouTube and reality television-based weblettes. A POV shot follows the protagonist through their homes, waiting for the reveal as it rounds the corner to show the mess in the living room, the girl undressing in the back, or the boat stashed in the leaves on the island.

Our response to such imagery is a combination of suspense and discomfort. We're not sure we're following the right people, that we're in good hands, that the plot will unfold satisfyingly - it being shot on-the-cuff - or even resolve, or is resolvable.

A sense of mediation in constructing film narratives gives us cold assurance, even as the films may be out to fornicate with our heads and create anxiety in such sensual blunderbuses as Saw, Irreversible and Funny Games. Yet such horror films (all stemming directly from the overly formalized experiments of Carpenter through to Tarantino) create mood, tension and plot by careful and methodical arrangements of shots and compositions. They all spectacularly show us what we want to see, but on their editorial terms.

They're not accidental. We get tense as we watch a character walk through the dark basement, the camera directly in front of the heroine, in too close - backing up, and we're unable to see what is ahead of her (although since she's facing forward and continues to walk, we assume there is nothing largely or visibly dangerous in her view ahead. Although whatever that may be is behind us and out of "our" sight.).

When the camera is instead behind her, following and in close as it moves with her, we may be able to see what's ahead of her (as she does) but unable to know what's creeping up just behind (besides us, and a steadicam rig. We want her to ... turn around!).

These are specific constructions that reveal to us visually only certain information and perversely withholds other (including the cat that is just about to jump or be dropped onto the heroine's shoulder). A well-constructed horror film manipulates and withholds, teasing out bits of eye candy and gruel in careful measure and juxtaposed in blunt and spectacular manner.

We enjoy this grand guignol display. When it works we give over to the sensual roller-coaster of confrontational and impossible logic, with a hidden design of frustration and surprises that reveals itself only in the process of our enrapture if not in the quoditian denoucement of the plot. A solid story well told is its own reward, and we laugh as we exit, wiping our flopsweat off our brows and telling ourselves it's only a movie.

The held shot, in suspense, is the single unit of horror that challenges our understanding of the underlying design, waiting to commit to an edit to which the intent of the protagonist is finally exposed, when he decides to go into the basement; when the filmmaker will withhold what's ahead and not behind; when the spectator must accept that what's about to be shown is texture rather than text.

The edit creates order. The edit, a collision of images, is a sequence like a sentence, constructed logically. It is in the edit that tension is created and then released, a question is asked and then answered, in which options are abandoned for the one that is chosen. The spirit becomes body, God becomes the word, the word becomes flesh. The comfort of storytelling becomes manifest. Seeing is good.

A handheld and undisiplined camera troubles us. We simply can't get our bearings. We wait for the angle to change so we can see more. Once we see past Jamie Lee Curtis to what's behind her, we discover how close the monster is, what the space is between them.

We wonder about the how rather than the what. The cut is comforting. It releases us from a film's grip, for an instant and instantly, in the space between 2 frames, and for a moment, we can relax.

History Will Be Written By Nobody

The historical record is the most important object that civilization probably creates. It's not a discreet product or manufactured building or monument that is pre-ordained, pre-determined, or pre-meditated.

It's not a cultural mandate or steered agenda. It's not controlled and it's not finished. The historical record is made up of millions of memos and emails, hundreds of thousands of news stories and video feeds. Documents and bank statements and journal entries and tape recordings. Photographs. Paintings and graffiti and poems and testimony.

Evidence. It's authentic and it's honest and it's made for reasons other than historical reasons, which is why it is so valuable. It's not worried about how it will look 100 years from now; it's worried about now. It all survives as a cumulative and infinite monument to who we were and what we cared about so that the culture of the future will understand how we lived, why we lived, what we were trying to discover about the world and about ourselves.

The most important primary resources of the 19th century frontier life were the hand-written letters that were saved by the pioneers. It was a big deal to get a letter in the old days, and endless minutia were relayed in those pages, which still exist today for historians to discover how things were in the summer of (18)49, how much bread costs, where the roads were being laid down by who's property, who sired what children.

This everyday discourse isn't written down with pen and paper anymore. It's hiding in emails, Facebook news feeds, or Twitter. Its sheer amount - and the perception that it's all so very unimportant noise - precludes anyone from wanting to save it, or being able to, certainly not the people who first created it. Facebook isn't archiving their site... except to mine your data to place ads. While someone' s grandfather may still be printing out all their emails, no one I can imagine is printing out all their friends' status updates.

You won't be able to pull your tweets out of a shoebox under the bed in 100 years like you could a box of letters. The vast amount of social interactions are now taking place between those iPhone IMs and Google docs and whole new generations of us will never commit our diaries, business contracts, family photos, geneology, or bank transactions to anything other than the cloud, up there on someone else's server, where no one's saving it for the sake of its historical value.

Only for its financial exploitation.

We all have stories of that hard drive that crashed last year and lost the pictures of our trip to Disney World or our Aunt Lora, who's dead now and we'll never see what she looked like the last 10 years of her life.

We're likely living in a digital dark ages, right now, and in 100 years we won't be able to know who our friends were, what we said to each other, what roads we travelled next to what properties, how much we made or who sired our children. All, uncommitted to long-term storage and without true historical custodians, will be lost, along, I'm sure, with this post.

Would You Buy A Used DVD From This Man?

The good news is that we, as a race of consumers, have finally figured out that we really don't need to buy every sell-through DVD in stacks at Best Buy, in spite of any value-added deleted scenes or alternate soundtracks. The DVD of Don Roos's "Bounce" had 120 minutes of stuff that was deleted from the final version, longer than the running time of the film itself.

I for one would have loved to have seen the integral version, all 3 3/4 hours edited artfully together.

DVD sales have dropped over 10% last year, and are falling faster this year as consumers figure out how they want to consume their media, either by paying for 2-disc/special edition box they may not want to watch more than once or ordering it instantaneously on their increasingly hi-def devices in their living rooms.

Blu-ray can go home. It's estimated that 20% of people watch some sort of video online daily. Whether it's Hulu, YouTube, or Netflix's streaming, it's clear that consumers aren't beholden to the old model of buying individual widgets anymore. I remember the days of walking into the used DVD aisle in Amoeba and seeing literally 100+ used copies of Cast Away, all for less than a quarter the original price. The disconnect between our need to "possess" a cultural event (which Cast Away arguably was, at least for a month) and realizing we had woken up with the hangover after having drunkenly overindulged was clear to me then. The chilling feeling that our pockets had been picked when we weren't paying attention made us want to just get rid of the evidence and take a long hot shower.

We will have more access to more video and other filmed entertainment once broadband reaches to every corner of every coffee shop, to every device large and small. Quality will depend on what we're watching and where. We won't have to buy director's cuts of films that had no directors in the first place or collect deleted scenes just to be completists, a Sisyphean quest in that it's like trying to collect everything that isn't there.

What we will be buying access to all this stuff. It'll be in the famous "cloud." It's up there, somewhere. That means it won't be on your shelf, and that also means you won't be in control of it. Consider it Web 3.0. While the last iteration was nice for all you home-brew radio jockeys who got off on changing facts on Wikipedia and remixing Lawrence Lessig, now the corporations have a chance to feed you the films, the videos, the songs, the content wirelessly onto devices they are building to make sure their content plays just for you.

And plays just from them. That's the bad news. No more all-access t.v.s, radios, or computers. (Or even, iPods, a more restrictive but still relatively crackable container, in part because the songs are objects that can move and morph fairly easily.) Set-top boxes like Apple TV and Netflix's Roku are the beginning of the movement to get Trojan horses into your gates. DRM'd, all of them. Disney has their KeyChest scheme and an impressive handful of other major companies have announced DECE. Best Buy and CinemaNow are in cahoots to build and sell and fill these devices in the short term.

This paying for access through a box we don't have the keys to will effectively replace cable eventually, as well as the easy ability to TIVO or record these things off the "air." Disney, as you may have read, is promising to allow access to any film or program you "lease" from them forever.

Forever is a long time. I'm not sure I believe that.

As we, as a race of consumers, let these big players in distribution take charge of where we get our content, and how much we pay, we have lost an important part of out rights to choose, to browse, and to do with what we want with the content we (think we have) bought. Even it it's copying the damn thing onto our drive to remix it and selling the original to Amoeba.

Spectacles Public and Private

Movies seem bigger than ever and less relevant than ever. We're not falling in love with going to the movies. Because we don't go, certainly not as often. They're simply around too much. In too many sizes. "Star Trek" notwithstanding, and even that feels like a t.v. show that will translate well to my iPod.

The common lament since about "Star Wars" is that filmmaking stopped being an artform (as if it ever really was) and became only about selling tickets. No more cine-clubs discussing Bergman, Fellini or Pakula. But looking through the nostalgic fog of a past we read about but didn't live through, show business is about spectacle and always has been.

From the earliest days, the hits are those that are the biggest events - the ones that get our attention one way or the other. By electrocuting Jumbo, having sound for the first time, being in color, louder, more expensive, by simply being a new take on an old story, better.

Spectacle grabs people's attention. "Transformers" and "Harry Potter" would be at home in a theatre in 1977, but they're wrapped in 2009 digital fireworks. They're not so much films as controlled burns. The aggressive retro-new excess of something like Scorcese's "New York, New York" was its own film-nerd spectacle of its day, artschool indulgence writ large.

It didn't help anyone's career. It didn't help anyone other than the critical studies majors. But at the time it drew its own attention. Worth doing if not worth the price. A conundrum when we interrogate what and why studios produce what they do.

Nowadays business decisions take the ego and arrogance out of the equation. New modes of delivery mean new modes of audiences. What's old isn't new - it's simply new.

The spectacle is the way in which it is engaged in, modern, digital, and transformative. The content is less important than simply that there is some.

It's a bottom-up shift, driven by the public who simply don't buy a movie if they don't buy the hype, or buy a ticket in spite of all indications to the contrary if it's what they want to see. The studios are playing catch up and realizing the old ways aren't going to work much longer.

What is available always eventually reflects how people watch moving images. Soon, portably and in chunks, in low-definition - and most fatally - casually. Films won't matter anymore culturally because they won't have a cultural impact. Film will become the moving wallpaper of science fiction.

There will be space for spectacle, for CGI-candy. But Bergman and Pakula is over. They don't translate.

Some will appreciate the past and enjoy it privately. Maybe find a handful of other enlightened individual believers. We will not be watching the same screens.

Teen Scream

Teen comedies have changed over the last 10 to 20 years because teens have changed.

Of course. The audience is what dictates what's produced, because if a movie shows in an empty theatre, does it make any noise?

Around the '70s and '80s there was a rash of films about teenagers spying on other teenagers. "Private School," "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," "H.O.T.S," and of course "Porky's" all depend upon sometimes complicated setups in which teenagers attempt to steal glimpses of the opposite sex undressed in semi-private situations (and often end up naked themselves).

At the movies were the only place you could see what a naked person looked like (besides from fine art books) and drive-ins became the preferred and privileged site of such voyeuristic pleasure by teens. Often for more than just what was on the screen.

In burgeoning age of cable and video, it became easier to experience what was forbidden and withheld. Teen comedies continued to be produced, but they were increasingly out of touch with how teenagers acted and what they wanted - they shifted from a life-style accoutrement to the exploitation they frankly were. I seem to remember some Brendan Fraser films in there somewhere, and the ubiquity of video didn't do teenagers any favors. The increasingly parent-safe "10 Things I Hate About You," "She's All That" or "Clueless" are all based on classics - yet they still feel like your pocket's being picked by 50-year-old men in shark-skin suits.

The "American Pie" movies returned to the earthier trends of the '70s with a knowing, post-modern tone and less desperation in the need to see skin. They simultaneously went farther sexually and embraced a Farrelly Brothers sweetness (which continues through the Apatow comedies) that makes them both controversial and conservative. Now that anyone can see anything online, teen films are no longer merely about the struggle to catch glimpses of naked people, let alone to get laid. Now they strive to make it mean something more than the smarmy sniggling innocence of "Porky's" would have you believe.

The teen films of the '80s are hopelessly dated now, but capture a specific time in everyone's development when being alone with your lust and fantasies was allowed and comodified.

Teens may have not changed so much but their modes of finding out about the opposite sex have. With the Internet and 100 channels on cable, the sense of discovery is no longer in a car, in the back seat, at the drive-in. In front of a glowing screen revealing secrets.

The emotional attachments, the physical and psychological changes we felt while viewing forbidden images (it's something out of "A Clockwork Orange") aren't there for a new generation.

Teen comedies (and sex comedies in general) are carriers of a different kind of information. They're too damn responsible. They're too damn polite.

Dark Archives

In film archiving programs much like the one I am in, what you end up learning is a lot more about library studies than actual preservation of film.

What's important now is not trying to find an extant copy of an old lost classic. Let's presume that most of the films that can be found have been... or are deteriorated to the point of past saving. Now "archiving" is figuring out how to present what's still around to future generations, and future generations aren't interested in going to museums.

What archiving means now is to learn how physical document-style record-keeping archives keep track of their stuff. It means cataloging, and creating metadata for the Internet.

Describing moving images with words is a challenge that has yet to be conquered. As machines and software get better at "identifying" what a film clip or series of shots is about, the more a human with some kind of cultural sense and taste needs to intervene and perform triage on the alphabet soup that's created. You can't describe the elegance of a match cut in Renoir with even two stills together on a webpage.

You can't capture the flicker in Marlene Dietrich's eyes. Or the swagger in Asia Argento's poise.

Yet everything is being streamed to us anyway, on the Internet in any form they can deliver it to us. We no longer can be concerned with the best possible copies. Now we are beholden to creating the fastest-deliverable ones. There are over 4000 35mm prints of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen in existence. In 6 months when it hits DVD, over 3800 of them will have been purposely destroyed to prevent piracy (although it's already on the Internet in digital form). And by the time of the third Transformers film there may be no film prints at all - it will be delivered digitally to your local exhibition spaces.

Newsweek (or was it Film Comment?) was right: Film is dead. They merely announced it a couple of decades too early. Sure, the old classics (and not-so-classics) on film are still being saved, on negative if they still exist, forgotten in dark archives. The temperature is lowered and the lights are dimmed so no more damage is done, for that moment some time in the future when people care about film again and want to see actual light shone through actual chemicals on celluloid and reflected off a silver screen, rather than transmitted with the electronic glow of digital perfection.

The archives are quiet. Companies are releasing the same hits over and over again in newer formats rather than exploring deep into the canon. The industry is trying to shake as much money as possible out of people, but it's hard when everyone is getting everything in a reduced resolution and in small pieces, often only temporarily - and for free.

No one's figured out what to do when people expect so much more for so much less. The old business model of selling atoms people keep is being challenged and undermined forever.

We're in a profound period of transition, psychologically, culturally, financially, and philosophically.

Now

Has there ever been a film more review-proof than Transformers 2? The word is so uniformly and excoriatingly bad, not only from the egghead academic critics from such august publications as the New York Times and Aintitcool.com, but from our friends who saw it - to let us know it was so god-awful bad to try to, fruitlessly it turns out, warn us off.

That's a more immediate and direct kind of "word of mouth." From the very type of people who were predisposed to like it or were at least up for the dare and waited in lines (and there were long lines) on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd days and paid for the privilege of being simultaneously bludgeoned by the effects and sound while being insultingly starved by a paucity of content or intentional nuance.

$200 million worth of people saw Transformers 2 (and that's only domestically) and if the word of mouth really has serious effect and the grosses fall 75% each week for the next 4 weeks its sheer momentum will still ensure it will finish closer to $1 billion by August.

Is it worth all the money that was spent on and for it?

It's not high art (and I submit, it is art) but rather, an instance of performance. A triumph of marketing, branding, of sheer hype and push. No one wanted this film who hadn't dodged the 1st one, but its existence seems to assert itself - as a kind of fait accompli - as an event by its mere monumental presence. It's being sold not as a continuation - as a sequel or even a deeper exploration of plot points introduced and hinted at in the first. Shia and Megan aren't anywhere to be found in the materials.

Its about being in line, surrounded by a hundred other half-drunk fratboys, screaming and "ahh"ing, and covering your ears. The digital billboards on the day it opened didn't even insult us by listing the title, as some desperate hat-in-hand attempt to sell tickets.

They merely say "NOW." That muscular blue and orange image was enough.

We get it. This is happening. You in or out? Where's the line?