“Unfortunately, years of language dilution by lawyers, marketers, executives, and HR departments have turned the powerful, descriptive sentence into an empty vessel optimized for buzzwords, jargon, and vapid expressions.”
If you enjoy Jason’s point of view, check out the excellent book Hot Text by Jonathan and Lisa Price. Originally published in 2002 on New Riders, Hot Text is a practical guide to help business copy writers tighten up their online prose.
Writing effective copy is much easier said than done… I’ve said it, I’ll try to do it, and I’ll inevitably slip up. A manager’s day doesn’t afford a lot of time on issues of grammar or style. It can be seductively easy to rely on pop-management shortcuts. This often buries whatever useful and compelling ideas were in the message to begin with.
Overtures on my mind lately. Basil Dearden used the overture in the 1966 film “Khartoum”. The full edit, including the overture, is available in Hulu. The current youtube version unfortunately skips past the intro program:
One of the most memorable film overtures appears in Alexander Sokurov’s “Spiritual Voices” (1995), a five part video diary of Russian soldiers in northeastern Afghanistan. The first 40 minutes of the series consist of a sequence of mostly static landscape images, accompanied by classical music, and the director’s occasional narration. It’s a remarkable design decision, it works on many levels of the story, most noticeably in setting the tempo and emotional tenor for the balance of the material.
Another effective use of the overture can be seen in Ridley Scott’s “Kingdom of Heaven” (2005). This film didn’t win me over, nor was it intended to. Nevertheless, the score and other big budget details are as well produced as you might expect:
Finally, a different type of cinematic overture. “Restrepo” is another Afghanistan war diary, from Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, and recent winner of the Sundance 2010 best documentary prize. Like “Spiritual Voices”, this video doc is set in eastern Afghan border country. Restrepo’s story and production methods demand comparison to Sokurov’s, although the intention and direction of each led to quite different results. Both examine the lives of soldiers at a close angle; Sokurov’s footage edited to accentuate the timeless themes of infantry life, whereas Restrepo feels cut as an overture to modern warfare.
I’m generally not a great fan of noodley blues jazz, even as delivered in the guise of interplanetary transmissions. But Sun Ra had his thing and his thing was nothing short of spectacular. He was a brilliant storyteller.
Dr. W.B. (Pete) Clapham Jr. is another lyrical storyteller, though somewhat less colorful and well known. In 1973 he published a prosaic looking and poetic reading textbook titled _Natural Ecosystems_. Here’s an exceprt, where Pete gives us a simple and heady overview of energy:
“Energy can be defined as the capacity to do work, whether that work be on a gross scale, such as raising mountains and moving air masses over continents, or on a small scale, such as transmitting a nerve impulse from one cell to another. Three sources of energy account for virtually all the work of the ecosystem: gravitation, internal forces within the earth, and solar radiation. The last is of greatest interest to us. It is important not so much because there is more solar energy than any other kind but rather because the sun is the ultimate source of energy for virtually all living things. In addition, solar energy heats the earth so that ecosystems can exist, and it drives many other natural phenomena, from atmospheric circulation to cycling of water through the ecosystem.”
When you listen to Sun Ra’s “endless story”, you hear a lot of repetition. There are any number of ways to interpret his use of repetitive structures, including: homage to the folkier roots of jazz; the influence of composers like Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and later works by Stravinsky; and maybe even a deeper philosophical message about the cycles of life in the natural world. We might conclude from the video passage above that he’s riffing on the repetitive elements within a broadly non-repetitive natural system, reminding us that while it’s important to be here now, it’s also important that we be not-so-wrapped-up in a single melody that we forget the rest of the arrangement. Otherwise we risk mistaking a sentence for a chapter, or a chapter for a story.
Dr. Clapham’s book is a solid chapter in a grand story. It’s easily worth more than $1.49 plus $3.99 shipping in very good condition paperback via Amazon.
Dodes’ka-den is described as “a kind of guerrilla filmmaking”. The 1970 production was month long exercise in rapid and cost effective design decision making. In the course of this exercise, Kurosawa established a bold new aesthetic for color and character driven storytelling. His use of color is iconic, and surreal, while never disrupting one’s emotional engagement with the narrative.
It’s tempting to interpret Dodes’ka-den as the foreshadowing of stylistic techniques yet to be fully revealed. Tempting; the film is minimal and schematic in relation to Kurosawa’s body of work. As strong as his feeling for color was in 1970, the thoughts come across as an emerging dialect, while later expressions “Kagemusha” (’80) and “Ran” (’85) – both of them – present formal and immersive master courses in a stunning visual language.
The Jomox “Resonator Neuronium”. Obnoxious name and I enjoy obnoxious names.
The Youtube comments are as funny as you’d expect – ranging from “This is bar-none the coolest thing on youtube…” to “very bored piece of hardware[...]”
There are other ways to generate atmospheric loops and I’ve never seen any that can be as dynamically and organically modulated; it has the potential for highly expressive if inherently unpredictable performances in the hands of a skilled tweaker. The video gives a quick impression of how the Resonator interacts with sequenced midi data and heavy delay. I believe it has 1/4 inch stereo inputs too.
Mentioned this enjoyable movie in an earlier post. The poetic true-life story treats time as a central character. Much of the footage is from the 70′s (it’s affecting to see the twin towers in their infancy). The scenes of New York are moving.
The perpetrators of the event were preparing a film from their earliest stages of planning. They spent 6 years planning the walk, and several decades producing the film.
Meanwhile, the spectacle itself is an exercise in total focus on the present, a moment which results only from a sustained vision into the distant future. Philippe Petit displays enormous organizational ability, courage, highly refined acrobatic skills and a zen like appreciation of the now moment.
“Siberiade” is a spectacular film by Andrei Konchalovsky. The four part epic story reveals many ancient and modern themes, in an ambitious effort to understand humanness in times of cultural instability.
The title of this post is in reference to Siberiade character Afanasy Ustyuzhanin, who abandons the social and economic responsibilities of his tiny village to clear a road through the woods, on course to a distant region told in folk stories as a source of great danger (“the Devil’s Mane”). His friends and family criticize this irrational pursuit. Society fears that the road will lead to spiritual ruin. The labor is backbreaking and his course is openly self-destructive.
Despite all physical and emotional obstacles, Afanasy continues until ultimately he is overcome by nature and dies on the job; pretty heavy stuff. And the question is clear – why? Why is he obsessed with this project? What drives a man to such madness?
Character Afanasy brings to mind a brush clearing fanatic down in Crawford, Texas.
Indeed, Oliver Stone paid tribute to Konchalovsky in his recent work “W.” Stone’s sequence of young W. working with a Texas oil crew invokes several scenes from Siberiade. It’s hard to not view W’s behavior in the context of characters Aleksey Ustyuzhanin and his tree chopping grandfather Afanasy.
These two excellent films are essential viewing for anyone who seeks to understand the social, cultural, and environmental impacts of economic globalization. I encourage watching them both in succession, starting with Stone.
There’s a moment during one of the black power scenes in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Sympathy for the Devil” where the narrator speaks from the perspective of the economic elite about using drive in movies as a means to control the masses. Godard’s intent was to explore mass culture as an artsy intellectual critique of the failures of intellectualism. It’s a slow paced, abstract piece with many hidden layers of symbolism, beautiful recording studio footage and exceptional narration.
The story of the film production is interesting too. Not surprisingly there were conflicts between Godard’s original vision and the final product that went to market. It’s amusing to think that a studio would work with a known trickster like Godard, and expect the results to somehow not explode in their faces.
Unlike modern productions featuring trendy pop stars, Godard’s 1968 message was that consumers were obligated to engage in the culture. He argued that fans of the Stones shouldn’t be content with the mass produced and slickly marketed blues rock of that period. Rather fans should dig deeper and learn about the roots of blues music. What’s more, you can’t watch his footage of the Stones in rehearsal without sensing a sort of bemused amateurism in these pop art icons. It’s strong realism that brings the subjects down to earth while inspiring a different type of respect for their work and the work of their producers!
Speaking of great work, friends at the Disposable Film Festival are doing a fine job shining a light on an emerging genre of video art – video produced using non-professional equipment. Their second festival in SF a few months ago was a big success and they’re organizing screenings around the world. Currently they’re hosting a Bike in Movie screening on May 13, 2009 in downtown San Francisco. It’ll be a fun night.
You have to believe Godard would be pleased to learn of a bike in screening of cool new genre of DIY movies. Maybe someone on the internet will let him know.
Many have expressed confusion about the Banksters’ success in hustling ever greater piles of public cash.
The first Yakuza Papers film was released in 1973 by the Toei Company. “Battles Without Honor and Humanity” was so brilliantly written (Iiboshi & Kasahara), and directed (Fukasaku) that it inspired a five part series, countless filmmakers, and initiated a style of crime story that is popular still. A recent excellent example is Borrone’s 2008 “Gomorrah”.